ROME: Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement on Friday dismissed calls for a unity government, saying an immediate re-vote was needed to resolve the deadlock created by a national election in March.
President Sergio Mattarella has called a final round of talks with party leaders on Monday to try to secure a coalition deal but, failing that, is expected to seek backing for a technocrat government to help keep Italy's finances on track.
However, 5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that an election should be held on June 24, waving away concerns that there was no time to organise it and dismissing the need for a stopgap administration.
"Once a government starts, it will cling on at all costs," he said.
He also rejected suggestions that parliament should revise the electoral law yet again to try to stave off future deadlock: "It can't be done. We would waste years arguing about it."
The last four Italian prime ministers took office thanks to backroom deals rather than ballot-box victories, and repeated efforts to devise an electoral law allowing the swift formation of a government have failed to come up with a winning formula.
At the March 4 election, a centre-right alliance led by the anti-immigrant League won the most seats, 5-Star emerged as the biggest single party and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) limped in third. No group came close to securing a majority.
A matrix of vetoes has prevented the parties doing a deal, with friction and frustration growing by the day.
RISING LEAGUE
Mattarella does not want to dissolve parliament, and instead hopes to put together a short-term government to draw up a 2019 budget, which has to be approved by the end of December, a source in his office told Reuters on Wednesday.
Unless there is a new budget, an increase in sales taxes will be triggered automatically, which would jeopardise Italy's fragile economic recovery.
Newspapers reported on Friday that the head of state might name a non-political prime minister as early as next Tuesday, tasked with trying to win a workable parliamentary majority for a limited and clearly defined mandate.
If the person failed to win the necessary confidence votes, they would remain in charge in a caretaker capacity, and a fresh election would be held in September or October.
Opinion polls suggest new elections would still end in stalemate.
A survey by Demopolis released on Thursday put 5-Star on 33.2 percent against the 32.7 percent they won in March, while the centre-right bloc was forecast to take 39.5 percent against 37.1 and the centre-left 21.1 percent from 22.8.
The biggest change was seen within the rightist alliance, with support for the eurosceptic League jumping to 22.9 percent from 17.4 percent and backing for former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia dropping to 12.2 percent from 14.0.
With Italy potentially heading back to the polls, old campaign themes returned to the fore, with the founder of 5-Star, Beppe Grillo, reviving a recently discarded party policy to hold a referendum on Italy's euro membership.
"I want the Italian people to give their view," he was quoted as saying in an interview with the French website putsch.media.
Grillo played little part in the recent election campaign and there was no indication that 5-Star was ready to walk back on its recent assertion that a referendum was not needed.
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