Opinion

Challenging succession of President Mattarella in Italy

photo_camera Sergio Mattarella

We are now only seven months away from the end of the presidential term of Sergio Mattarella, tenant of the Quirinal Palace (seat of the Italian Head of State) since late January 2015. Naturally, a successor must be found, given that, although the 1948 Constitution does not provide for any term limits (nor does it do so for the president of the Council of Ministers), it is traditional for the outgoing president to be replaced by another person and re-election does not take place. Let us recall that there has only ever been one president of the Republic (Napolitano) who has repeated his mandate: it was in the spring of 2013, and it was due to the inability of both the left and the right to reach a consensus candidate. But it was only a temporary election to get out of the situation, not least because Napolitano was about to turn 88 years old. Hence, as soon as possible, the very veteran politician announced his resignation at the end of the following year and a month later the Electoral College (made up of just over a thousand people) decided to elect the former deputy prime minister and Sicilian Sergio Mattarella as the new president of the Republic.

Certainly, if anything in Italian politics has been particularly complex, it is the election of the head of state. For any candidacy to go ahead, it requires the favourable vote of two-thirds of the electoral body, if it is to win on the first, second or third ballot, and of half plus one of the votes after the fourth ballot.

It is true that there are a number of unwritten rules guiding the election. The first of these is that potential candidates must have an unblemished track record, since the President of the Republic has traditionally been a figure of enormous prestige and social consideration. Moreover, he or she must have an important knowledge of the political class of the moment, since, in the event of conflicts between parties (something very common when it comes to the Italian Parliament), the President of the Republic must act as arbiter and resolve the problem of ungovernability that has just arisen, being able to resort to a non-political government (as Mattarella has recently done by commissioning Mario Draghi to form a government) or dissolve Parliament and call elections in advance if he finds that there is no real "maggioranza" that can govern the country. Finally, a pact between left and right is often sought, though this is not always possible: in the 2006 election of Napolitano, he came out on top because neither left nor right managed to impose their candidates; in 2013, there was not even a last-minute agreement between the political forces, which forced Napolitano to revalidate his mandate (much to his regret); and in 2015, Mattarella emerged with the votes basically of the centre-left plus a handful of "snipers" from the centre-right whose names were never known because the vote, in this case, is secret.

Until the beginning of February this year, the issue seemed very clear in the run-up to the presidential election: there was only one candidate, and his name was Mario Draghi. A banker and economist by profession, with a long career in Italian institutions (as early as 1990 he worked for the Ministry of the Treasury and later became governor of the Bank of Italy), and with an outstanding performance at the head of the European Central Bank (even the Germans surrendered to the rigour and efficiency of Draghi, the key man in saving the single currency between 2011 and 2019), as well as an independent profile (he has never been a member of any political party), the only unknown is who would put his name on the table first. All the political forces would have voted for him except for the Five Star Movement, which is accustomed to giving the "note" even when the candidate proposed by the majority has all the virtues to be voted for.

Draghi, however, after the fall of the centre-left coalition ruling the country since September 2019, was called by Mattarella to take charge of the government, and the question is what will happen now. Draghi's chances of becoming the new president of the Republic remain intact, but will the Roman banker want to leave the government when the task entrusted to him has just begun? Let's remember that the main purpose of his appointment as "premier" was to implement the funds of the so-called "Recovery Plan" (209 billion in the Italian case), but by the time the presidential election arrives (end of January 2022), Draghi will have barely begun his work. By that time he will surely have managed to vaccinate the entire population and thus ensure that the spread of the coronavirus, which has already claimed around 100,000 victims in the transalpine nation, will have been halted, but the European funds will have barely begun to make themselves felt. And Draghi is not the sort to leave things unfinished, which is why he is likely to ask the various parliamentary forces not to appoint him as the new president of the Republic. 

If this were to happen, there are several alternatives. The first is for Mattarella, like Napolitano, to be re-elected for a second term. Although he will be in his eighties this year, he has demonstrated, with the latest government crisis, that he is in full physical and mental health (in addition to the fact that, on the whole, he has had a comfortable presidential mandate, with the only exceptions being the complex negotiations for the so-called "Government of Change" (March-May 2018) and the appointment of a new government in September 2019 after Matteo Salvini brought down the previous one). Mattarella, a widower, is in no great hurry to return to his native Sicily. He also has the highest possible rating among the Italian population, and he also knows that his second term in office, as happened with Napolitano, would be a temporary solution while awaiting a new election that would surely take place just a year later. Draghi could accept becoming President of the Republic, since, with two years at the helm of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, his work would have obvious effects on the country's progress, and he also has a successor of the utmost confidence: Daniele Franco, former director general of the Banca d'Italia and now Minister of Economy and Finance.

Naturally, we have to count on Draghi maintaining his "no" and Mattarella refusing to accept re-election (as soon as he can, he sends out messages to this effect; last week he said at a public event with young people that he was already "old" and that he was looking forward to returning to his native Sicily). If this were the case, then there would be a real problem, not least because it would be the first time that an independent prime minister would have to elect a head of state. Let us remember that, in the case of Napolitano in 2006, the prime minister was Romano Prodi; that, in 2013, Mario Monti, although independent like Draghi, was in office and the one who had to promote a candidate was Pierluigi Bersani, the winner of the general elections in February of that year; and that in 2015 the prime minister was Matteo Renzi, who at that time belonged to the Democratic Party (PD).

Mario Draghi

Who might be the alternative candidates? That is a difficult question to resolve. The candidacy of Romano Prodi, who was prevented from running in 2013 by 104 PD "snipers", may be back on the table. The economist and two-time premier (1996-98 and 2006-08) will be 82 years old by then, but that is no obstacle: Sandro Pertini, a socialist and the most voted president in the history of presidential elections, became the new president of the Republic at 82, which was the age he was in 1978, when a new head of state was elected after the resignation of the previous president (the Christian Democrat Giovanni Leone).

Former Prime Minister Mario Monti still has a chance: he will be 78 at the time of the election, is a senator for life and is still a respected figure, even if his government is not well remembered for the drastic reduction in public spending it had to make. But it is equally true that he knows Italian politics well; that he has a proven track record of honesty; and that his personal and intellectual prestige remains intact.

Silvio Berlusconi, a four-time premier (he is the person who has been at the head of the Council of Ministers for the longest time, some 3,500 days in three different legislatures), could also be elected president, and he himself has offered his candidacy. But the Lombard politician and businessman is in increasingly precarious health: in September he will turn 85, has already had two open-heart operations (2006 and 2016) and is now suffering constant hospital admissions.

In fact, tenants of the Quirinal Palace never stand out for serving as prime ministers on numerous occasions at the same time. Alcide de Gasperi, who was premier eight times in succession between 1945 and 1953, was offered the post of first president of the Republic in 1946, but declined because he was fully engaged in building the new political, economic and social order that would culminate in the 1948 Constitution and the holding of the first elections in the history of the Italian Republic (June 1953). The Roman Andreotti never had a real chance of becoming President of the Republic, because the left-wing DC and the PCI would never have given him that chance. Amintore Fanfani, six times prime minister, tried in 1971, but the "snipers" prevented him from becoming president and the chosen one was the Campania-born Leone. And both Aldo Moro and Mariano Rumor, both five-time presidents of the Council of Ministers, never became official candidates for the Presidency of the Republic: Moro managed to get his man (the social democrat Giuseppe Saragat) elected in 1964, but nothing else.

In this regard, it is not yet clear who this prestigious figure might be who could be elected President of the Republic. There have never been so many former presidents of the Council of Ministers alive in the presidential election: De Mita, Berlusconi, Prodi, Monti, Renzi, Gentiloni, Conte.... However, among those who have been around for many years (De Mita, Berlusconi and Prodi), plus those who have little political weight, or whose popularity is very low (the clearest case is Matteo Renzi), and also those who have little relevance among the political class (Conte), plus, finally, those who are busy at the moment (Gentiloni is Commissioner for Economic Affairs), there is really no one who can be labelled "presidential candidate".

There are no other names of prestige in the political class, especially among those who have been prominent in recent times. Bonino and Bossi are both ill (besides Bossi was sentenced to two years in prison), Fini is retired and Maroni just as well, and there are no long-serving deputies (as Pertini or Napolitano were in their time) who deserve the honour of becoming the first institution of the state.

Thus, things remain wide open. It would not be surprising if the final candidate were to emerge from an alliance between the centre-right and Renzi's Italia Viva: together they account for the votes needed to produce a candidate on the fourth ballot. And the level of confrontation between Renzi, on the one hand, and PD and Cinque Stelle, on the other, is so high that the new president of the Republic can hardly come from the ranks of the left as happened in the case of Napolitano or even Mattarella. Let the Italian politicians surprise us once again, but the "tottonomi" has already begun, and will continue to do so until late January 2022.

Pablo Martín de Santa Olalla Saludes is professor of History of European Integration at the ESERP Centre and author of the book 'Historia de la Italia republicana' (1946-2021) (Sílex Ediciones, 2021).