Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced to his cabinet on Thursday that he would step down from his post. The decision, rejected by President Sergio Mattarella, was taken after a crisis triggered by the 5 Star Movement (M5S), one of the parties that make up the governing coalition.
Since 1998, the country has had ten changes in command, and even the periods of relative stability have been complicated. The only prime minister to serve a full five-year term from 1989 onwards was Silvio Berlusconi, the loudmouth billionaire whose name has become synonymous with scandal.
In the same period, Germany has its third prime minister in Olaf Scholz and France, with recently re-elected Emmanuel Macron, the fourth president.
Political instability in Rome has its roots in the electoral system adopted after World War II, which was purely proportional. This has resulted, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, in large numbers of small parties and frequent coalition governments, as well as political deadlocks.
In 1994, the country would have the culmination of the so-called Operation Mãos Limpas, which would serve as inspiration for the Brazilian Lava Jato years later. The serious corruption scandal swept away the few elements of political stability — in particular the popular Christian Democrat Party — and, since then, attempts at reform have failed. Matteo Renzi’s centre-left government was defeated in a 2016 referendum that would have changed the constitution to boost the prime minister’s powers.
A separate reform created a mixed vote system for the legislature: two-thirds of legislators were elected proportionally and the remaining third by direct district vote. But the results of the March 2018 election indicated that the new system had done little to create stability.
Once-dwarf parties like Matteo Salvini’s M5S and La Liga have gained much support, overcoming traditional forces and accentuating political fragmentation. The current legislature, for example, has already had several formats, with the largest party, the M5S, participating in all of them and the most recent imploding.
The outgoing premier’s predecessor, the populist Giuseppe Conte, first split the coalition with the League. When Salvini brought about the fall of the government in 2019, he rebuilt the majority with the PD, only to resign in February 2021 after another crisis.
At the time, Draghi took over the so-called government of national unity, with all political forces except the ultra-right Brothers of Italy. Raised in an upper-middle-class family in Rome, the politician enjoyed popularity for having headed the European Central Bank (responsible for monetary policy in countries that use the euro) in one of its most serious crises.
He studied in Jesuit schools and had to take over the family as a teenager, when his father, director of the Bank of Italy, and mother, a pharmacist, died within a few months.
A profile published by Sheet at the time of his inauguration, he recalled that a school friend and now a diplomat, Staffan de Mistura, described him as a “team boy”: “On the field, he always passed the ball. He was not the best player we had, but he always had a strategy, knew which way to go”.
Draghi received a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an experience that, according to him, strengthened his conviction in the European Union project. He worked at the World Bank in the 1980s and entered public administration as director general of the Italian Treasury in 1991, working towards the adoption of a single currency in the EU (Italy’s accession to the euro came in 1999). He then moved into the private sector at Goldman Sachs and in 2006 moved to the Bank of Italy.
It inherited a serious crisis when it took over the ECB in 2011, with indebted Greece threatening to leave the EU. A scathing speech in 2012 in which he promised to “do whatever is necessary to preserve the euro” is touted as a turning point in expectations. “Believe me, it will be enough.”
Negotiations and bailout policies dragged on for several months, but Greece was bailed out, and steadfastness in defending the euro earned Draghi the nickname “Super Mario.” Upon leaving the ECB mandate in 2019, he said he would also leave the public scene. The promise fell in 2021, when he became premier in the first political race of his career.
The climate of appeasement seemed so strong that he was even considered for the position of president in the election earlier this year – in which Sergio Mattarella ended up re-elected.
