Italy's rival populist leaders to report on coalition talks
By FRANCES D'EMILIO, Associated Press
May 14, 2018 10:06 AM CDT
Leader of the League party, Matteo Salvini, talks with journalists at the end of a meeting with Five-Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio in Milan, Italy, Saturday, May 12, 2018.(Flavio Lo Scalzo/ANSA via AP)   (Associated Press)

ROME (AP) — Italy's rival populist leaders were summoned to the presidential palace on Monday to report on whether have nailed down a coalition deal to give the nation a government, more than 10 weeks after an inconclusive election.

Luigi Di Maio, who leads the 5-Star Movement, and Matteo Salvini, head of the right-wing, anti-migrant League party, were given separate meetings to brief Italy's head of state, President Sergio Mattarella, at the Quirinal Palace.

Both Salvini and Di Maio ran for premier in Italy's March 4 election for Parliament. With neither willing to cede to the other, it was expected they would suggest that Mattarella tap someone else palatable to them to lead the coalition.

Di Maio and Salvini huddled for a last-minute meeting before the start of the latest talks with the president. They also met for hours Sunday and several times last week to devise a deal that could satisfy their largely different constituencies.

If the two succeed in forging a new government coalition, it will put the 5-Stars in Italy's national government for the first time. It would also be Italy's first all-populist government, at a time when nationalist and anti-EU sentiment is gaining in traction across much of the continent.

The forerunner of Salvini's League, the Northern League, was the main partner in the three center-right governments headed by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi starting in 1994.

The March 4 election saw the 5-Star Movement, which bills itself as an anti-establishment force, become Parliament's largest party, with some 32 percent of the vote.

But the biggest single bloc, at some 37 percent, is a center-right alliance with Salvini's League and Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

After Berlusconi refused to have anything to do with the 5-Stars, who he regards as "more dangerous than communists," Salvini and Di Maio set out to hash out an agreement to join their own forces in government.

The League's voter loyalty is predominantly in the north, where its backs lower taxes and reining in it considers wasteful central government. The north's legion of small, often-family-run businesses are the backbone of Italy's most productive region.

The 5-Stars' appeal has surged in the south, where chronic youth unemployment, running more than 50 percent in many areas, made Di Maio's pledge to guarantee a minimum income to the unemployed immensely attractive.

The opposition Democrats, who controlled the outgoing government, are warning that the League's vow to drastically lower taxes to a flat 15-percent rate, and the 5-Star's promise to give government subsidies to those with low incomes, will spook financial markets and drastically drive up government borrowing costs.

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Frances D'Emilio is on twitter at www.twitter.com