Emperor penguins on snow hill island,antarctica

GERMANO BELLINA PRESSENTS

 

WITH HIS LEGACY OF SLEAZE, CRONYISM AND CORRUPTION, FORMER TYCOON PM SILVIO BERLUSCONI HAS EMERGED AS ONE OF SEVERAL HURDLES TO THE FORMATION OF A GOVERNING COALITION BETWEEN HIS LEAGUE ALLIES AND THE ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT FIVE-STAR MOVEMENT.

He loves me. He loves me not. The wooing and posturing that has followed Italy’s inconclusive election reads like a daisy oracle – a shifting game of courtship in which the lead roles blow hot and cold one day to the next, so as to keep their suitors both keen and wary.

Calling the steps are the two nominal winners of the March 4 election. One is theFive-Star Movement, which emerged as Italy’s largest single party with a whopping 32 percent of the vote. The other is the anti-immigrant League, which supplanted Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia as the dominant force in the largest coalition of parties.

Their youthful leaders have both claimed the right to form a government, but neither Five-Star’s Luigi Di Maio, 31, nor the League’s Matteo Salvini, 45, commands a majority in parliament.

“Both are behaving like they won the election,” says Amedeo La Mattina of Italy’sLa Stampa newspaper. “But the fact is neither camp can rule without a partner.”

An unexpected idyll

Of all the unnatural alliances that have been mooted to find a way out of the deadlock, a tie-up between the two has emerged as the likeliest option – not least because it would be seen as an alliance between winners, with all the momentum and legitimacy this entails.