Mere weeks after Italy's right-wing coalition announced its victory in the general election, the first fault lines are appearing, meaning the three-way alliance could be over even before the government is formalised. The resounding victory by far-right leader Giorgia Meloni in the 25 September vote is not sitting well with 86-year-old Silvio Berlusconi — the former three-time conservative prime minister who, four decades her senior, fancies himself the elder statesman of Italy's political right.
Meloni is expected to be asked next week by Italy's President Sergio Mattarella to try to create a governing coalition with campaign allies Berlusconi and right-wing leader Matteo Salvini and become premier.
Behind-the-scenes divvying up of ministries in what would be Italy's first far-right-led government since the end of World War II started after her Fratelli d'Italia, or Brothers of Italy party took 26% of the ballots cast — more than those won by the forces of Salvini and Berlusconi combined.
The knives carving out those Cabinet posts are proving particularly sharp.
Salvini on Saturday issued a sort of call for a truce between Meloni and Berlusconi so that the three allies' bid to rule Italy isn't derailed.
"I am sure that even between Giorgia and Silvio that harmony, which will be fundamental to government, well and together, for the next five years, will return,'' Salvini said in a statement released by his anti-migrant League party about the escalating post-election tensions.
Meloni pledges to 'unite the nation'
Meloni already stood her ground during the election campaign as well.
When opinion surveys indicated that she was by far the front-runner over Berlusconi and Salvini, those two unsuccessfully tried to wiggle out of a long-standing pact that the top-getter in campaign coalitions would become premier should their forces prove victorious.
Together, the leaders' three parties command a comfortable majority in the newly seated Parliament.
Still, Meloni needs the forces of Berlusconi and Salvini for any viable coalition.
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Salvini chafed for days when it appeared Meloni would not let him become interior minister, a post he held in 2018-2019 and used to crack down on migrants arriving by the tens of thousands on smugglers' boats or rescue ships. On Friday, Meloni's forces backed the election to the presidency of the lower Chamber of Deputies of a Lega, or League party lawmaker, Lorenzo Fontana — an ultraconservative who, like Salvini, has openly admired Russian President Vladimir Putin. Late Friday, the five-pointed star symbol of the World War II antifascist movement was scrawled along with La Russa's name on a Brothers of Italy office in the Rome neighbourhood of Garbatella. It is the very office where Meloni began her career as a teenager in the youth wing of a neo-fascist predecessor of her own party, MSI.