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After 14 months of being ignored, mocked and yanked around by his deputies in Italy’s nationalist-populist government, the departing prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, used his resignation speech last week as a last-ditch audition — filled with previously unseen flashes of gravitas and steel — for the leading role in the government to come.
On Thursday, Mr. Conte got the part.
Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, gave the little-known lawyer turned political power broker the task of forming a sequel, but drastically different, government known as Conte II. (“Conte Reloaded,” preferred the conservative daily Il Giornale.)
Mr. Conte will now begin meetings with all party leaders and is expected next week to submit to Mr. Mattarella a cabinet that, if approved, will then be brought to parliament for a confidence vote.
[A new government takes shape in Italy, sidelining Matteo Salvini]
In accepting the mandate, Mr. Conte said on Thursday that he wanted to win back lost time “to allow Italy, a founding member of the European Union, to rise again as a protagonist” and “transform this moment of crisis into an opportunity.”
He acknowledged that he had entertained “doubts” about taking on a reconstituted government after the last one collapsed, but said he “overcame this perplexity” out of a responsibility to serve Italy’s interests.
In taking on “this political project,” he said, he did not represent a single party, but the interests of all Italians, something he said Italians had come to appreciate.
A week after the collapse of his last government, a nationalist-populist alliance between the anti-migrant League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, Mr. Conte will preside over a populist/anti-populist coalition between Five Star and the center-left Democratic Party.
The joining of two parties that have called each other every name in the book, including Mafiosi and kidnappers, internet trolls and hatemongers, was remarkable.
But so was the resuscitation of Mr. Conte, who hardly seemed to matter through much of the last government, where he was overshadowed by the hard-right leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, ostensibly his deputy.
Mr. Conte once even called a news conference to remind the country that he was the prime minister.
“I’m not here just to scrape by or drift,” he said at that June conference, adding, “I can and want to do more.”
Now he will have an opportunity, as the European establishment is hoping, to help Italy heal its rifts in the European Union, rediscover a modicum of financial responsibility and return to the table of European leaders.
Mr. Conte, fond of pocket kerchiefs and purple ties, is studiously dapper even when discussing legislation with a man in his underwear on a Naples balcony. His florid vocabulary — he has casually dropped words like logomachy — sounds official without actually saying much. In time, he has overcome a delivery and facial expressions that seemed marked by fear and indigestion.
“He’s a minor figure who managed to carve out a role for himself,” said Donatella Di Cesare, a professor of political philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome.
“He had no history,” she added, which helped him fit into the part of an institutional administrator who could give the harshly euroskeptic, populist and anti-migrant government a more amenable face. The parties chose him, she said, because he was “someone who played the role.”
Newspaper headlines on Thursday expressed admiration for his transformation. “He went from yes man to the lord of politics,” read La Stampa. “A quasi-leader who put bullies in their place,” read La Repubblica. “A Portrait of a Puppet Who Became Prime Minister,” read il Foglio.
And he has made friends in high places.
During a side-by-side news conference at the White House in July 2018, President Trump introduced Mr. Conte as “my new friend” and on Tuesday came through for him, endorsing him in a tweet, albeit one that spelled Mr. Conte’s name wrong. (Mr. Trump called him Giuseppi.)
That vote of confidence was invoked on Wednesday night by Five Star’s political leader, Luigi Di Maio. “The endorsement from Donald Trump made us understand that we are on the right track,” he said in announcing the agreement with the Democratic Party to bring Mr. Conte back.
At the 2018 news conference, Mr. Trump stressed that he and Mr. Conte had a lot in common. In one sense, he had a point.
“Like the United States, Italy is currently under enormous strain as a result of illegal immigration. And they fought it hard,” Mr. Trump said. “And the prime minister, frankly, is with us today because of illegal immigration.”
It was a backlash to the migrant crisis, and the promised crackdown by the League and the more subtle anti-migrant messaging of the populist Five Star movement, that resulted in their election.
If Mr. Conte never seemed entirely at ease with the harsh anti-migrant policies, at times asking Mr. Salvini to at least let women and children off stranded ships, he never stood up to him and signed off on the toughest anti-migrant legislation.
His greatest concerns seemed to be about the political damage Mr. Salvini wrought on the Five Star Movement, with which he was clearly aligned. In December, an Italian television program caught Mr. Conte appealing in so-so English to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at the coffee bar of an international meeting for pointers on how Five Star could stop Mr. Salvini’s electoral juggernaut.
“We have made polls and they are worrying, because Salvini is at 35, 36 percent,” he told Ms. Merkel. She nodded politely.
Before the election in March 2018 that brought Five Star to power, its leaders introduced him as a potential minister in a Five Star government. When they needed the support of another party to govern and turned to the League, the two parties settled on Mr. Conte as a consensus prime minister.
He had a rough start. His rollout was complicated by the discovery that he inflated his résumé. Only last year he seemed unsure of his job security when, while acting as prime minister, he was caught planning to take part in an English proficiency exam for a teaching job at a Rome university.
In his first weeks on the job, he was caught in Parliament asking Mr. Di Maio, technically his deputy, if he was allowed to say something.
But it was Mr. Di Maio he ended up eclipsing.
In Mr. Conte’s resignation speech last week, as he lambasted Mr. Salvini, seated to his right, as a dangerous, authoritarian, disloyal opportunist who cared more about his own political success than the country, Mr. Di Maio, seated on Mr. Conte’s left, brimmed with visible delight.
Mr. Di Maio, his own poll numbers cratering, had sought to elevate Mr. Conte over the past year as a counterbalance to Mr. Salvini. Even Mr. Salvini’s social media gurus admired Mr. Conte’s increased popularity, which they attributed to his institutional bearing.
At first, the Democratic Party insisted on a clean break with the previous government. But the insistence of the Five Star Movement on Mr. Conte, and Mr. Conte’s track record of not mattering much, made it easy for the Democratic Party’s negotiators to accept him as a condition of an alliance that would bring them back to power.
And in negotiations over the past week, the Democratic Party infuriated Mr. Di Maio by making it clear that it now naturally considered Mr. Conte as its chief interlocutor and the Five Star Party leader, despite his lack of official membership.
Mr. Di Maio, whose previous job experience consisted largely of working as an usher at a soccer stadium, was again forced to search for a job in the government while support for Mr. Conte came from the party’s highest authority.
Beppe Grillo, a founder of the Five Star Movement and one of its power brokers, wrote on his blog Tuesday that God had personally given him a message to send to Mr. Conte. In the post, which Mr. Grillo signed as God, he made it clear that Mr. Conte was the chosen one.
“Am I wrong,” he wrote, “or one of the biggest fears in Italy today is that you get back in the playing field, Mr. Giuseppe?”
Even Mr. Di Maio had to exalt the once-and-future leader.
“A great interpreter of this new humanism, how he himself likes to call it,” Mr. Di Maio said through a gritted smile on Wednesday night. “A man of great courage, who has demonstrated his will to serve the country with a spirit of self-sacrifice and abnegation.”
Thousands of demonstrators gather outside Houses of Parliament on Wednesday in London to protest against plans to suspend Parliament. NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption
The leader of Britain's House of Commons today called lawmakers opposed to the suspension of Parliament "phony" and questioned if they have the "courage or the gumption" to change the law or bring down the government to avoid a no-deal Brexit.
Speaking to the BBC, Jacob Rees-Mogg made the comments a day after Queen Elizabeth II approved an extraordinary request from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to suspend Parliament, known as prorogation.
Prorogation leaves Parliament little time to take up Rees-Mogg's challenge – either to pass a no-confidence motion against Johnson or to push back the Brexit date.
Lawmakers reconvene Sept. 3 but under prorogation will disband the following week. They return Oct. 14, just 17 days before Britain's Oct. 31 deadline to leave the European Union.
In 2016, Britain voted in a referendum to leave the EU. Former Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated a divorce deal with the EU but Parliament rejected the agreement three times. The impasse ultimately brought down her government.
Meanwhile, Brexiteers have insisted that despite concerns over economic chaos, Britain must leave even without a deal.
"All these people who are wailing and gnashing of teeth know that there are two ways of doing what they want to do," Rees-Mogg, a member of Johnson's Conservative Party and a confirmed euroskeptic, told the broadcaster. "One, is to change the government and the other is to change the law."
"If they don't have either the courage or the gumption to do either of those then we will leave on the 31st of October in accordance with the referendum result," he added.
Johnson's move infuriated opposition politicians and sparked a strong reaction from many ordinary Britons who turned out in the streets.
Thousands of anti-Brexit protesters, some carrying signs that read "Stop the Coup," gathered Wednesday night in Parliament Square. There were smaller demonstrations in Manchester, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Durham, according to the Evening Standard.
Protester Emma Cooper, 28, told The Guardian: "I feel absolutely livid. I haven't been to a protest for a long time," she said, "What's happening in this country and the right wing shift around the world is really worrying. I think Brexit is xenophobia extended to a bigger level."
Well over 1 million people have also signed a petition against suspending Parliament.
Commons Speaker John Bercow, a hard-line "Remainer," called Johnson's move a "constitutional outrage."
"At this early stage in his premiership," he said, "the prime minister should be seeking to establish rather than undermine his democratic credentials and indeed his commitment to parliamentary democracy."
Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, wrote to the queen to protest Johnson's move "in the strongest possible terms on behalf of my party and I believe all the other opposition parties are going to join in with this."
Johnson, who became prime minister barely a month ago, holds a single-seat majority in Parliament but some of his own party members oppose a no-deal Brexit.
A public petition against U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's suspension of parliament passed the 1 million signature milestone within its first 24 hours as protests broke out across the country.
The queen on Wednesday approved Johnson's plan to suspend parliament from September 9 to October 14, a highly controversial move which would restrict parliamentary time for opposition Members of Parliament (MPs) to try to block the U.K. leaving the European Union without a deal on October 31.
Sterling slumped 1% on the announcement and were trading down at $1.219 on Thursday morning.
In addition to the petition, impromptu protests broke out outside the Palace of Westminster in central London, with organizers claiming thousands marched from the parliamentary building towards Downing Street, where the Prime Minister's official residence is located.
Smaller protests also took place in cities such across Britain including Manchester, Liverpool and Edinburgh, with protesters chanting "save our democracy" and "stop the coup."
Johnson's government has moved to characterize the suspension, or "proroguing" of parliament as a procedural norm in the run up to a Queen's Speech, in which the monarch sets out a new government's plans for the first time after it is formed. Johnson took over as prime minister on July 24 after being elected as the new leader of the ruling Conservative party by its membership, following the resignation of Theresa May.
The prime minister told Sky News on Wednesday that "there will be ample time on both sides of that crucial 17 October summit in parliament for MPs to debate the EU, debate Brexit and all the other issues."
However, the timing of the prorogation has been met with widespread criticism and interpreted as a bid to limit parliament's ability to influence the Brexit outcome. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, called the move a "constitutional outrage."
Members of Johnson's own party have also lashed out at his perceived pursuit of a no-deal scenario. Speaking to CNBC in Westminster on Thursday, veteran Conservative MP Ken Clarke said Johnson had yielded to the "fanatic element of his followers."
"I hope it will bring together the sensible majority in parliament who will find an alternative to this, not only debating it properly but actually saving us from just crashing out with a no-deal Brexit, which he is only pursuing because he has sold out to the people he has surrounded himself with, who appear to want it," Clarke said.
Asked if he could consider working in a caretaker government with opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the former cabinet minister added that would take any necessary action to "stop this country creating the childishly disastrous mistake of crashing out with no deal."
Conservative Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom defended the prorogation Thursday morning.
"There will be plenty of time when the House comes back, with a new Queen's Speech and a new parliamentary session, to be able to debate Brexit, to be able to debate the prime minister's new withdrawal agreement, should he succeed in negotiating that with the EU. So I am confident that this is the right thing to do," she told CNBC.
The U.K. government's official petitions site states that all petitions with over 100,000 signatures will be considered for debate in parliament.
This has proven largely symbolic, as a petition for the U.K. to revoke Article 50, which triggered the process of departure from the EU, and remain in the bloc received over 6 million signatures but was flatly rejected by the government in March.
Up for his first Emmy nomination for playing a murderous Member of Parliament in A Very English Scandal, Hugh Grant today took a killer aim at perpetually ruffled UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the move to suspend the House of Commons and slide in a no-deal Brexit.
The Golden Globe winning actor who played possibly the most beloved fictional 10 Downing Street resident ever in Love Actually had little of that infamous British stiff upper lip in chastising the former London Mayor for the potential constitutional crisis and anti-democratic taint created by the five-week suspension:
You will not fuck with my children’s future. You will not destroy the freedoms my grandfather fought two world wars to defend. Fuck off you over-promoted rubber bath toy. Britain is revolted by you and you little gang of masturbatory prefects. https://t.co/Oc0xwLI6dI
— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) August 28, 2019
Termed a prorogation, the procedure was approved this morning by Queen Elizabeth II under advisement from the recently installed Johnson and the UK’s Privy Council.
With #StopTheCoup trending on Twitter in Britain and around the world on Wednesday, protests have emerged on the streets of the island nation and among leading politicians both of Johnson’s own Conservative Party and Opposition parties plus the Commons Speaker John Bercow. The latter called the strong arming to clearly curtail debate before the October 31 exit of the UK from the European Union a “constitutional outrage” as others plan to challenge the move in Parliament itself when the body convenes briefly next week.
No stranger to airing his own political views online since the dark days of the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloids hacking scandal back in 2011, Grant will probably be on this side of the pond for the Emmys on September 15.
Whether the UK Parliament is shut down until mid-October or not, the Four Weddings and a Funeral alum is up for Outstanding Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his portrayal of one-time UK Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe. As in my review of last year and elsewhere Grant has been acclaimed for his performance in Amazon’s A Very English Scandal of the once influential would-be statesman and his 1970s attempt to have his lover Norman Scott killed off to avert their affair being revealed.
Too soon to tell how history will judge Boris Johnson over today’s actions, but the disgraced Thorpe was found not guilty in a heavily Establishment-biased trial in mid-1979.
Hacked off indeed.
