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Bloomberg
The referee, it seems, has taken sides.
After spending much of the last 10 months acting as a mediator between the feuding deputy premiers who hold the real power in Italy’s government, PM Giuseppe Conte appears to have sided with one of them: the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio.
When Conte called for the resignation of a cabinet undersecretary who comes from the League, the other party in the coalition, he may have tipped the scales from playing a consensus-seeking role to one in which his own political leanings are surfacing.
The official, Armando Siri, became the latest bone of contention between the two sides of the coalition after prosecutors named him in a corruption investigation. Leaders of Five Star, which has long campaigned on a clean-politics platform, have been calling for his removal ever since. The League, led by party chief Matteo Salvini, has defended him.
Conte, who belongs to neither party, initially sought to mediate in the Siri case, as he has done throughout a year of conflicts in the coalition, on issues from taxes to infrastructure to environmental policy.