Conte opens to primaries and attacks Meloni, "a woman alone in command"

On the day the Chamber definitively approves the new electoral law, changing the rules under which the next general election will be held, the leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle Giuseppe Conte shifts attention to the opposite side of the political spectrum: that of the center-left.

Conte has called for primaries of the broad coalition to be held as soon as possible. A move that explicitly acknowledges the ambition of the Democratic Party leader:

“Elly Schlein legitimately wants to be the candidate for prime minister” — Giuseppe Conte, leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle

In the same remarks, Conte launched a direct attack on the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, describing her as a leader who, over the course of the legislature, would have isolated her own government allies, in a phase that Conte himself describes as the prime minister’s political solitude.

The call for primaries comes at a moment when the framework of electoral rules has just been redrawn: the Chamber gave final approval, by secret ballot, to the text introducing the requirement for political forces to indicate their candidate for the presidency of the Council, after the clash between the majority and the opposition, which have already announced an appeal to the Constitutional Court. In a system in which political forces must formally indicate their own prime ministerial candidate, the question of who will lead a coalition alternative to the center-right takes on a different weight compared to the past, because it directly affects the lists that parties will have to present.

The available dossier does not report a response from Elly Schlein to Conte’s proposal, nor elements regarding a possible formal convening of a round table among the forces of the broad coalition to discuss timing and methods for any primaries. The news currently comes from a single source; no independent confirmation is currently available regarding statements in reply from the Partito Democratico or other forces within the coalition.

The question of what the scope of an internal competition within the broad coalition would be, and which political actors would take part in it beyond M5s and Pd, remains open at the current state of the available information.