Draghi isn’t coming to Italy’s rescue anymore

Italian politics bears a striking resemblance to South American telenovelas: filled with episodes of unrequited love, bizarre couplings and multiple breakups. Narrative lines reach a fever pitch of crisis before an unexpected turn of events makes everything right — the deus-ex-machina moment. That’s the climax in ancient dramas when a god is swung on stage by a machine to snatch away a troublesome character who can’t be written out of the script otherwise.
The Italian left, led by the Democratic Party, is now hoping for a deus-ex-machina moment after its election strategy came undone with the sudden departure of a centrist ally just four days after they’d agreed to join forces against the surging right. But who will play God? The party is betting on the sacred aura of Mario Draghi.
Led by Enrico Letta, the Democratic Party is still reeling from the collapse of its alliance with the centrist Carlo Calenda. If he can form a government after the September ballot, Letta says he will continue Draghi policies and avenge the sudden and rude departure of the former central banker. He accuses the Right of subverting Draghi and betraying Italy’s interest by forced the early election.
The problem? Draghi himself has no intention of playing the savior in this drama. Those who still hope the man who saved the euro will enter the heat of the campaign to sway the outcome are bound to be disappointed. He won’t.
Throughout his time in office, Draghi made it clear that he was responding to a specific mandate, one to which he was appointed not elected. He was given a mission by the President of the Republic which consisted on steering Italy’s pandemic recovery plan in the right direction to get European Union funding in exchange for reforms.
That was the work of a manager, not a politician — and Draghi has shown no appetite for the dirty politics required to hold on to power in Rome. Considering the antics of the past two months, who can blame him. He made his historic reputation saving the Euro in 2012. He doesn’t want his name dragged through the mud now. Neither does he want it exploited in the ongoing electoral game.
The Democratic Party will find it impossible to do Draghi without Draghi. Boasting that it is pursuing the Draghi agenda without the technocrat’s participation will be a hard sell. Draghi’s work is done and the politicians know it. Giorgia Meloni, the head of Brothers of Italy and front runner, may be short on detail on pretty much everything, but she’s the loudest voice in the room screaming more freedom and less state. For Letta’s party to be compelling, it needs to do more than to repeat Draghi, Draghi, Draghi.
Letta had the good instincts to pursue a broad coalition from centrists to the hard left. But his so-called campo largo — which roughly translates as broad field — required so much flexibility from everyone it ended up stretching to the breaking point. And indeed that’s what happened. Calenda, who pulled the plug, broke off the deal arguing that some members of the alliance were equally populist as the Right and even had a record of voting against the Draghi government. There’s now talk of a Terzo Polo — a group of centrists who could come together to offer voters a third option. This sounds complicated. It’s also inefficient. The more splits there are among the center-left forces, the better for Meloni, who is rejoicing after the latest drama. The polls indicate that Letta’s Italian Democratic party is neck and neck against Meloni’s Brothers.

—Bloomberg