Italian PM Draghi wins vote but his unity government remains in peril

Italian Premier Mario Draghi (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Italian Premier Mario Draghi has won a confidence vote in the Senate, but boycotts by three of his key coalition allies in the voting seem likely to have doomed the government’s prospects of survival.

The vote on Wednesday went 95-38 in the favour of Mr Draghi’s government, but it was a hollow victory.

Italian Premier Mario Draghi attends a debate at the Senate in Rome (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

“In these days of folly, Parliament decides to go against Italy,” tweeted Enrico Letta, a former premier who leads the Democratic Party, the only large party in the coalition to back Mr Draghi in the confidence vote.

“Italians will show themselves at the ballot box to be wiser than their representatives.”

The rapid unravelling of Mr Draghi’s 17-month-old coalition in the last hours could prompt President Sergio Mattarella to dissolve Parliament, opening the path to holding an early election, possibly as soon as late September.

Just before the vote, representatives of the populist 5-Star Movement, the conservative forces of former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party and right-wing senators of Matteo Salvini’s League party announced they would skip the roll call.

Coalition turmoil prompted Mr Draghi last week to offer his resignation, but Italy’s president rejected the bid and asked the premier to test his government’s support in Parliament.

That test of his national unity government’s staying power failed dramatically on Wednesday night.

The coalition partners’ walkouts came despite an unprecedented outpouring of sentiment by citizens in the last days appealing for Mr Draghi to keep on governing, amid soaring inflation, high energy costs and a surge in pandemic infections.

After hours of debate on his fate, Mr Draghi asked the Senate to vote on a confidence measure calling on him to keep on governing.

Last week, Mr Draghi had offered to step down after losing support from a major coalition partner, the populist 5-Star Movement. But Mr Mattarella rebuffed the offer, asking him to go back to Parliament to gauge his support.

Appearing shortly before the vote in Parliament’s upper house, Mr Draghi cited an “unprecedented” outpouring of public pleas for him to continue governing.

Mr Draghi told the senators after hours of debate, including squabbles among coalition partners, that “at this point, I could declare my resignation and leave the hall.”

But because the “mobilisation that I have seen by citizens” and various associations is “without precedent,” Mr Draghi said he instead was submitting to a vote reconfirming the loyalty of the coalition’s parties.

Mr Draghi had said repeatedly he saw no other governing alternative than the unusually broad coalition he led.