Italy's League and Five-Star 'could form electoral alliance'

Rome, May 28 (IANS/AKI) Italy's anti-establishment Five-Star Movement and the far-right League party could campaign together in fresh national polls and their platform would be based on the joint anti-austerity agenda they drafted this month, said Five-Star sources on Monday.

While Five-Star sources told AKI of the proposal, League leader Matteo Salvini however dodged reporters' questions on a possible electoral alliance with Five-Star.

"I'll have to think that through with a clear head," he said, while praising the Five-Star politicians he worked with this month to hammer out a common programme of government.

"I found them to be serious, sensible people, who kept their word," he added.

 

An electoral alliance with the League would mark a total reversal of policy for Five-Star, which has previously shunned alliances with other parties.

Five Star and the conservative alliance led by the League were the biggest winners in Italy's March 4 national election in which no party or bloc gained an outright majority.

On Monday, Italy's President Sergio Mattarella invited a pro-austerity economist, Carlo Cottarelli, to form a caretaker technocrat government after populist premier designate Giuseppe Conte resigned when Mattarella vetoed his choice a eurosceptic economist as Finance Minister.

If Cottarelli's proposed cabinet line-up fails to pass a parliamentary confidence vote, fresh elections will take place as soon as September, Cottarelli said on Monday. If he wins a confidence vote, his caretaker cabinet will oversee the 2019 budget and fresh polls will be held early next year, he added.

Five-Star and the League - which together have a parliamentary majority in both houses - have vowed not to back Cottarelli and his proposed government's confidence vote.

--IANS/AKI

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