Choked in the cradle. The Count-ter is over. In fact, it never started. The first day of the consultations at the Quirinale, with the “little ones”, Leu, Iv and the Democratic Party, in procession to Sergio Mattarella , the curtain fell. Matteo Renzi is the only one who plays with his cards exposed. That frontal lunge live on facebook Wednesday evening against the “scandal” of the cow market underway in the Senate has put out the last few lights.
The count of the “Managers” does not go, the numbers are lacking, even the force fighter Luigi Vitali, “Builder” for a day, explained that the operation is in a dead end and in fact he has already changed his mind. Under these conditions, asking the head of state for re-appointment is a gamble to say the least. And it does not take a genius to understand that the staging in Parliament, with the switchboard of Palazzo Chigi smoking last-second calls in search of an extra vote, is not considered really edifying by the parts of the Hill.
The Conte-ter, then, is reduced to an artifice. He starts from there, to negotiate and arrive at something else. Thing
Hard to say. One thing is certain: Renzi has taken revenge on him. There is not a single hypothesis on the negotiating table that does not see it as the architrave of a new majority. And Conte’s hope, to return to dealing with the Rignanese from a position of strength, with an absolute majority in the Senate in his pocket, has already vanished for some time.
Thus, behind the cry “forward with Conte” that comes in these hours from the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party, there is a complex game of chess. There are two hypotheses in the field.
On the one hand, the return to the vote. There is a compact party, transversal to political forces, which pulls the rope to go to the polls. Conte and Nicola Zingarettithey are the first to shoot, but they can count on heterogeneous support, from Brothers of Italy to parts of the League and the Movement.
Voting is a risk, but it can also be cathartic. The premier-lawyer is now capitalizing on the consensus in the polls and the Democratic Party gets rid of the renzismo (even the residual one among its ranks).
Then there is the non-voting party, which certainly does not lack militants. Dissolving the chambers now means halving (in the best of cases) the places available, thanks to the referendum on the cut of parliamentarians which saw the Yes triumph in September. And the last voting window is closer than you think. On 11 April, the blue Dc Gianfranco Rotondi whispers on Twitter .
Here, too, the forces cut the political spectrum in half. EvenMatteo Salvini , to the amazement of some of his followers, opened Wednesday to a government of broad agreements.
Of course, deciding who will be the next tenant of Palazzo Chigi is a whole different story. The ball is in the hands of the Head of State. The solution of a technical premier, the names on the field are many, from Marta Cartabia to Carlo Cottarelli up to Enrico Giovannini , would be digested by a large part of the center-right, League in the lead, but in all probability it would go sideways to the Five Stars.
They, together with a slice of the Nazarene, would more willingly accept an institutional solution, like Roberto Fico, the Speaker of the House who gets along well with the dem. The alternative is a “European” choice. Paolo Gentiloni , the EU commissioner ready to sacrifice himself to bring the Recovery Fund into port, would not mind a return to Piazza Colonna . Renzi would say yes too, and the numbers in the classroom would return. But the list is long. The toto-names are crowded, from Dario Franceschini to Lorenzo Guerini to Pier Ferdinando Casini . The skein is tangled, it will be up to Mattarella to unravel it.
Nowhere, in the (real) abacus of the crisis, is the name of the Count-ter written. Which still hovers in the Roman palaces, but it’s just more of a ghost.
