ROME – The Italian Prime Minister resigned on Tuesday and caused the government to collapse.
This kind of thing happens all the time in Italy. But the return to a family state of political instability has never happened in the midst of a pandemic that has affected the country so deeply.
After offering the West a terrible preview of the misery caused by the coronavirus, Italy is again an unfortunate vanguard. It is testing whether a country, even one that is accustomed to governments that perpetually dissolve and reform, can manage vaccine launches, national curfews, business restrictions and huge economic bailouts during a total political crisis.
“Italy is a big mess, but also a big country,” said Agostino Miozzo, the coordinator of the powerful scientific committee that widely recommended the emergency locks and restrictions adopted by the outgoing Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte. “It is a country used to governing in emergencies and living in emergencies.”
Italy is far from being the only country to experience a political upheaval during the pandemic, as evidenced by the attack on the United States Capitol this month. But the government’s collapse on Tuesday weakened the decision-making apparatus of a nation that has seen more than 85,000 of its inhabitants killed by the virus.
The question is whether a government collapse in a country that has had more than 65 governments in the past 70 years really matters when it comes to executing Covid’s response.
As long as the political crisis is short-lived, the answer seems to be no.
“Time is of the essence,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss University in Rome. He said that if the crisis is short, as he expects, it will have little impact on the mechanics of the response.
“If we come out of this with a more solid majority, it could be better,” said D’Alimonte.
On Tuesday, Mr. Miozzo was chairing a meeting on the vaccine launch, restaurant openings and problems with schools at the same time as Mr. Conte presented his resignation to Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
Mr. Mattarella will hold consultations with parliamentary leaders for the rest of the week to choose from several options. He will decide whether Conte or someone else can garner enough support to govern or whether limited technocratic government is a better option. Otherwise, early elections may be necessary.
In the meantime, Mr. Conte’s government will remain in an interim capacity.
As Italy’s political forces maneuver to gain an advantage and more influence in the coming government, the country’s top health officials are offering assurances that the country is not falling into Covid-fueled anarchy. Italy, they said, could successfully navigate the pandemic on autopilot in the short term.
“Cruise control” was how the authorities in the Tuscan region defined it. And constitutional scholars have said that the fact that Italy is already in a state of emergency allows even a transitional government to exercise extraordinary powers over the virus.
But some other officials have expressed concern about practical obstacles if the crisis continues or if the failure to bring together a stable political majority leads to new elections.
Sandra Zampa, Italy’s undersecretary of health, said she feared that an “absurd” political crisis would result in a lack of direction at the top of the government, the ramifications of which she said were best seen in the United States, with increased infections and loss of life . She feared that calling new elections would “paralyze everything” and make the interim government a lame duck..
While Italy’s response to health remains the same as long as key ministers and technicians remain in office, said Zampa, a change in office and a weak government “would make management much more difficult”.
She said the protesters had already gathered to shout “we disobeyed”, restaurants opened illegally and regions challenged the methodology that triggered their blockades. The words of the government and its ministers, already weakened by the crisis, may have less weight and their decisions may be less effective.
Mr. Miozzo, the scientific adviser, called the political crisis a form of “madness” and said that while there was no immediate impact on the country’s pandemic response, he had concerns about potential coordination problems between the central government and the regions, vaccine implementations and blocking restrictions are performed.
The governors of these regions belong largely to the conservative political opposition that prefers new elections, which would likely benefit Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Liga nationalist party.
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Answers to your vaccine questions
Although the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put doctors and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is being made, this article will help you.
Life will only return to normal when society as a whole obtains sufficient protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they will only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens, at most, within the first two months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to infection. An increasing number of vaccines against coronavirus are showing robust protection against disease. But it is also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they are infected, because they have only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists still do not know whether vaccines also block coronavirus transmission. For now, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid crowds indoors and so on. Once enough people are vaccinated, it will be very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we, as a society, achieve this goal, life may begin to approach something normal in the fall of 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially be authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical tests that provided these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. This remains a possibility. We know that people naturally infected with the coronavirus can transmit it as long as they have no cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be studying this issue intensively as vaccines are launched. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to consider possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is given as an injection into the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection will be no different than the one you took before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines and none of them reported serious health problems. But some of them experienced short-term discomfort, including pain and flu symptoms that usually last for a day. People may need to plan a day off from work or school after the second injection. Although these experiences are not pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system facing the vaccine and developing a potent response that will provide lasting immunity.
No. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use a genetic molecule to prepare the immune system. This molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse with a cell, allowing the molecule to slide inward. The cell uses mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any given time, each of our cells can contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce to make their own proteins. After these proteins are produced, our cells fragment the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules that our cells make can survive just a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is designed to resist the cell’s enzymes a little more, so that cells can produce extra proteins from the virus and stimulate a stronger immune response. But mRNA can only last a few days at most, before being destroyed.
Several of these governors have already sought to diverge from the government’s position on a variety of issues, including vaccine administration and school opening. The crisis, Miozzo said, “can translate into action” even with regard to vaccines, including “different priorities of the regions over who to inoculate”.
“This is the real concern,” he said, that the regions “somehow feel more free to adopt defined and decided measures locally”.
Walter Ricciardi, World Health Organization adviser to the Italian Ministry of Health, shared this concern, but said that vaccines are controlled by the central government and doubts that regions will suddenly begin to immunize anyone they want.
All the tension, he said, was counterproductive.
“The virus is not interested in political positions,” said Ricciardi. “And when there are no governments capable of making decisions, it spreads without bothering.”
Mr. Conte and the leaders of the governing coalition, made up of the center-left Democratic Party and the populist Five Star Movement, denounced former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for causing the crisis.
Renzi hastened the government’s collapse by withdrawing its support for Conte, who was unable, after a week of frantic searches, to replace his votes in Parliament. The end of Renzi’s game was not exactly clear, but he is not the only one in the government to win with Conte’s premature departure.
Renzi said he pulled the plug because of Conte’s mismanagement of the pandemic, his lack of vision when deciding where to allocate hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds that Italy should receive from the European Union and his undemocratic methods of delegating powers to unelected committees.
Renzi’s critics, who are many, say he has jeopardized Italy’s response to the pandemic by a political maneuver. But his supporters claimed the opposite, that the government was hiding and exploiting the pandemic for political protection and that his argument made little sense precisely because, as government health officials said, the crisis had no immediate impact on the launch of the vaccination or the nation’s Covid response.
“It is especially in times of great weakness that, if a government is not up to the task, it must be changed”, Ivan Scalfarotto, member of the party of Renzi, Italia Viva, who left the post of undersecretary of the Itamaraty, said on Italian television .
“It is exactly when the ship is in the middle of a storm that we need to make sure that we are on track to get out of the storm.”
Emma Bubola, Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani contributed to the report.