Conte’s chameleon act gives him power in Italian crisis

Bloomberg

There is a mystery that hangs over Giuseppe Conte, of how an unassuming professor few expected to last became a political survivor and, at the height of the Covid pandemic, had more power than any Italian leader since Benito Mussolini.
It’s all the more intriguing when you consider he has no power base of his own and looked out of his depth at key moments of the crisis. And yet, as he gives Italians more freedoms for the summer after more than two months of lockdown, the prime minister is the most popular politician in the country, wielding emergency powers that lawmakers never even got to vote on.
“I have been accused of being a dictator, paternalist, illiberal,” he told reporters. “It seems to me that when this government needs to show its face and take responsibility, it has never failed.”
The thing that keeps coming up in conversations with government officials and politicians of all stripes is a certain chameleon-like quality that has enabled the so-called “lawyer of the people” to front a euroskeptic coalition and then to keep the country in line as a figure of the Italian establishment. What’s more, he is someone the European Union has realised it can reason with.
“Conte was born as a compromise but he’s managed to become indispensable,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, who teaches politics at Rome’s Luiss University. “That’s pretty exceptional for a prime minister without a party of his own.”
He’s never won a national vote, but Conte has established solid relationships with both US President Donald Trump and Germany’s Angela Merkel and outlived his early political sponsors to become an unexpected source of stability for both Italy and the EU as his country is battered by the coronavirus. There’s no general election due until 2023, though Italian governments are often short-lived and Conte’s second coalition has been shaky since it came together last year.
The 55-year-old’s high-wire act in charge of Europe’s fourth-biggest economy looked like it might have run its course toward the end of April, when stir-crazy Italians saw a pale and exhausted prime minister live on television struggling to explain why he still had to keep many things shut down. His government’s plan for another 55 billion euros ($60 billion) of spending to keep companies and families afloat also seemed to take an age to get approved by a squabbling cabinet.
“We are taking a calculated risk, aware that the contagion curve could rise again,” he said. “We are taking this risk and we have to accept it, otherwise we could not restart. We cannot wait for a vaccine.”
Conte, who will address the Rome parliament on Thursday on the virus emergency,
appealed to Italians in an open letter published by newspaper Leggo to respect health and safety rules as they edge
back towards some kind of normalcy.