After weeks of fierce criticism, three Italian ministers announced last week they will resign from Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s ruling coalition due to Rome’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister, said last Wednesday that two ministers from his Italia Viva party would resign, which was seen as a major blow to Conte. CNBC reported Conte appealed to the ministers and told them that a government collapse in the middle of a health emergency could be catastrophic for the country.
With the nation again in lockdown and its GDP down some 10 percent, 75 percent of Italians polled said Conte cares little for them and is only interested in his political survival.
“There will be a reason if Italy is the country that has the highest number of deaths and a collapse in GDP,” Renzi said, according to the Financial Times. He blamed the government’s handling of the outbreak for the crisis.
Yesterday, Conte won a vote in Parliament’s lower house by 321 to 259, a margin that gave him an absolute majority in the 629-seat chamber. Tomorrow, he faces a vote in the upper house Senate, where the government has only a slim majority.
TREND FORECAST: As Italy’s economy sinks deeper into the “Greatest Depression,” the populist movements and protests will grow significantly stronger. Anti-vax, anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-establishment will be key platform elements.
Indeed, significant elements of the new party formations against government control are emerging, according to Off-Guardian.org. Italian restaurant owners coordinated a day of defiance called “#IoOpro” or “I am opening.” It was the largest countrywide act of civil disobedience since the lockdowns were imposed by Prime Minister Conti last March.
Over 50,000 restaurants reportedly opened up in defiance of Italy’s lockdown rules, with patrons calling out the police, yelling, “Get out! Get out! Get out!… We pay your wages from our taxes, you work for us… Get out! Get out! Get out!” Italian opposition MP Vittorio Sgarbi told restauranteurs to “open up, and don’t worry, in the end, we will make them eat their fines.”
As more people are going broke and busted, and with nothing left to lose before they lose it all, there are also “Open Up” movements in Switzerland and Poland called the #Wirmachenauf and #OtwieraMY, respectively. Red State reported that over 500 restaurants in Mexico coordinated defiant re-openings as well.
TRENDPOST: Ignored by the media is the hard fact, according to New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has imposed and re-imposed harsh restaurant lockdown mandates along with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, that the virus infection rate from restaurants is 1.4 percent.
Despite this tiny percentage, severe restrictions have been placed on the restaurant business while they permit mass gatherings and big box stores to remain open.
