ROME — Former European bank chief Mario Draghi was positioned to lead what could quickly become Italy’s next government after the Italian president concluded Tuesday that squabbling political parties failed in a last-ditch effort to form a new coalition and that the nation could ill afford fresh elections while engulfed in the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Sergio Mattarella told the nation that only two options remained after the “negative outcome” from days of frantic political negotiations to re-compose the centre-left coalition that had formed the recently collapsed government of Giuseppe Conte.
The first was “a new government, able to deal with the grave present emergencies: health, social, economic financial,” said Mattarella, who is head of state. The second, he said, was immediate, early elections, a possibility that deserved careful consideration “because elections represent an exercise in democracy.”
Mattarella decided Italy quickly needed a ‘’government of high profile, that must not identify with any political formula” and that would be backed by political forces in the current in Parliament. He stopped short of saying who he had in mind for the premiership.
But right after his speech, a presidential palace official announced that the 73-year-old Draghi, who has been credited with saving Europe’s single currency during his tenure as European Central Bank president in 2011-2019, had been summoned to meet with Mattarella at noon Wednesday. That would give Draghi the opportunity to formally accept such a mandate.
The fragile prospects for reviving Conte’s government through a revamped political coalition disintegrated after former Premier Matteo Renzi gave a thumbs-down following days of frantic negotiations. Conte resigned last week after Renzi yanked his ministers from his tiny centrist Italy Alive party to protest what he said was the premier’s bumbling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Conte is now acting in a caretaker capacity.
Mattarella noted that after elections in 2013, it took four months to get a government in place, and after 2018 elections, five months. Repeating that would leave Italy suffering without a government in the “fullness of its functions for months, crucial, decisive, for the fight against the pandemic to utilize European funding and to face the grave social problems,” he said.
“All these concerns are well in the mind of our fellow citizens, who are asking for concrete and rapid answers to their daily problems,” the president said.
Nicknamed “Super Mario? for his work as the European Central Bank’s president during the single currency crisis, Draghi was cited throughout these last weeks of Italy’s political crisis as a possible solution if politicians couldn’t overcome personality and policy clashes for the sake of the nation.
The pandemic has devastated Italy’s long-stagnant economy and left the country with Europe’s second-highest COVID-19 death toll. The government statistical agency ISTAT reported Monday that nearly 450,000 jobs were lost in the last year.
During the last-ditch discussions that failed Tuesday, the parties in what is now Conte’s caretaker government squabbled over European Union pandemic aid and other key policy issues that were blocking formation of a more solid coalition.
Mattarella had given the collapsed coalition parties a few days to see if they could re-combine in a new government with a dependable majority in Parliament.
His call for wide support, even from the opposition for the next government, was swiftly taken up by a lawmaker from the Forza Italia opposition party of Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and former centre-right premier. Mara Carafagna said Mattarella’s appeal “for responsibility should spark authentic, profound reflection in whoever loves Italy and Italians and who still keeps the true sense of the world patriotism.”
Earlier, Renzi put all the blame on the failed effort on the other parties, saying, “We take note of the ‘nyet’ of the colleagues of the ex-coalition,” using the Russian word for “no.”
In turn, the populist 5-Star Movement, which was the main partner in back-to-back Conte governments since he came to power in 2018, contended that all Renzi wanted was more power.
“It’s obvious that the aim was to obtain more (Cabinet) posts. This was his most pressing” goal in provoking the crisis, said Vito Crimi, a 5-Star leader.
Except for Renzi, all the other leaders of the former coalition parties had thrown their public weight behind Conte for a new mandate.
In yanking his support, Renzi contended that Conte was bumbling the challenge of managing how more than 200 billion euros (about $250 billion) in EU funds and loans would be spent to help Italy recover from the pandemic’s damage, especially to the Italian economy.
The 5-Star Movement, which is close to Conte, resisted accepting billions of euros in EU loans aimed at bolstering the health system, aid the populists fear could make Italy beholden to EU dictates such as austerity measures.
Renzi had insisted that Italy should take the health system aid from Brussels.
Largely caught in the cross-fire has been the centre-left Democratic Party, which Renzi led during his 2014-2016 tenure as premier and he broke away from to start Italy Alive shortly after Conte formed his second coalition government in September 2019.
Conte’s first government, which took office in June 2018, partnered the 5-Stars with the right-wing League of Matteo Salvini. That coalition collapsed when Salvini withdrew his support in a failed manoeuvr to gain the premiership for himself. The Democrats, which then included Renzi, replaced Salvini’s forces in Conte’s second government.
Salvini had lobbied Mattarella in vain for early elections.
Frances D’Emilio, The Associated Press
The 2024 federal budget failed to spark a much-needed rebound in the polls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trailing Liberal party, according to new Ipsos polling released Tuesday.
Canadian reaction to the Liberal government’s latest spending plans shows an historic challenge ahead of the governing party as it tries to keep the reins of government out of the Conservative party’s hands in the next election, according to one pollster.
“If the purpose of the budget was to get a political reboot going, it didn’t seem to happen,” says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
The 2024 federal budget tabled last week included billions of dollars in new spending aimed at improving “generational fairness” and rapidly filling in Canada’s housing supply gap.
Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News shows voters’ reactions to the 2024 federal budget mostly ranged from lacklustre to largely negative.
After stripping out those who said they “don’t know” how they feel about the federal budget (28 per cent), only 17 per cent of Canadians surveyed about the spending plan in the two days after its release said they’d give it “two thumbs up.” Some 40 per cent, meanwhile, said they’d give it “two thumbs down” and the remainder (43 per cent) gave a symbolic “shrug” to Budget 2024.
“Thumbs down” reactions rose to 63 per cent among Alberta respondents and 55 per cent among those in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Some 10 per cent of respondents said the budget would personally help them, while 37 per cent said it would hurt, after again stripping out those who said they didn’t know what the impact would be.
Asked about how they’d vote if a federal election were held today, 43 per cent of respondents said they’d pick the Conservatives, while 24 per cent said they’d vote Liberal, followed by 19 per cent who’d lean NDP.
The Conservative lead is up one point from a month earlier, Bricker notes, suggesting that Budget 2024 failed to stem the bleeding for the incumbent Liberals.
Only eight per cent of respondents to the Ipsos poll said the budget made them more likely to vote Liberal in the upcoming election, while roughly a third (34 per cent) said it made them less likely.
“The initial impressions of Canadians are that it hasn’t made much of a difference,” Bricker says.
Sentiment towards the Liberals remains slightly higher among generation Z and millennial voters — the demographics who appeared to be the focus of Budget 2024 — but Bricker says opinions remain “overwhelmingly negative” across generational lines.
Heading into the 2024 budget, the Liberals were under pressure to improve affordability in Canada amid a rising cost of living and an inaccessible housing market, Ipsos polling conducted last month showed.
The spending plan included items to remove junk fees from banking services and concert tickets, as well as some items aimed at making it easier for first-time homebuyers to break into the housing market. It also included a proposed change to how some capital gains are taxed, which the Liberals have claimed would target the wealthiest Canadians.
Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, told Global News after the federal budget’s release that while he was encouraged by acknowledgements about the economic unfairness facing younger demographics, there is no quick fix for the affordability crisis in the housing market.
Trudeau, his cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs have hit the road both before and after the budget’s release to promote line items in the spending plan.
Bricker says this is the typical post-budget playbook, but so far it looks like there’s nothing that “really caught on with Canadians” in the early days after the release of the spending plans. The Liberals have a chance to make something happen on the road, he says, but it’s “not looking great.”
“Maybe over the course of the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate that they’ve actually changed something,” he says.
Bricker notes, however, that public opinion has changed little in federal politics over the past year.
The next federal election is set for October 2025 at the latest, but could be called earlier if the Liberals fail a confidence vote or bring down the government themselves.
But a vote today would see the Liberals likely lose to a “very, very large majority from the Conservative party,” Bricker says.
“What we’re seeing is, if things continue on as they’ve been continuing for the space of the last year, that they will end up in a situation where, almost an historic low in terms of the number of seats,” he says.
The Conservatives are leading in every region in the country, except for Quebec, where the Bloc Quebecois holds the pole position, according to the Ipsos polling.
The Liberals are meanwhile facing “a solid wall of public disapproval,” Bricker says. Some 32 per cent of voters said they would never consider voting Liberal in the next election, higher than the 27 per cent who said the same about the Conservatives, according to Ipsos.
Typically, Bricker says an incumbent party can hold onto a lead in some demographic, age group or region and build out a strategy for re-election from there.
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But this Liberal party lacks any foothold in the electorate, making prospects look grim in the next federal election; it’s so bleak that he even invokes the Progressive Conservative party’s historic rout in the 1993 vote.
“The hill they have to climb is incredibly hard,” Bricker says.
“I haven’t seen a hill this high to climb in federal politics since Brian Mulroney was faced with a very similar situation back in 1991 and ’92. And we all know what happened with that.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 18, April 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18-plus was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
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LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
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Fareed’s take: There’s been an unprecedented wave of migration to the West
On GPS with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he shares his take on how the 2024 election will be defined by abortion and immigration.
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