(Adnkronos) – Foreign minister and deputy premier Antonio Tajani on Monday denied Italy’s rightwing government might call early elections after last week’s resounding defeat in a flagship referendum on reforms to the judiciary led to the resignations of several scandal-hit officials.
“No one is considering calling snap elections; we are solely focused on measures to boost the Italian economy,” Tajani told the Italian Cuisine Forum in Manduria in the southern Puglia region by video link, answering a question from veteran journalist Bruno Vespa.
On Thursday, Forza Italia’s Senate leader Maurizio Gasparri resigned and was replaced by Stefania Craxi after 14 of the party’s 20 senators wrote to demand his removal. Gasparri was the latest casualty of the government’s abrupt shake-up aimed at limiting political damage in the wake of its bruising referendum defeat.
Last Wednesday, tourism minister Daniela Santanche belatedly accepted premier Giorgia Meloni’s invitation to stand down. Santanche faces trial on false accounting charges at a publishing group she previously owned and indictment for alleged benefit fraud at the same company during the Covid-19 pandemic. Santanche is also being probed by prosecutors over two cases of alleged fraudulent bakruptcy in an organic food group she chaired, although she denies wrongdoing in any of the cases.
A day earlier, justice ministry under-secretary Andrea Delmastro resigned after it emerged he held an undeclared stake in a restaurant with mafia links, while the ministry’s chief of staff, Giusi Bartolozzi stood aside after controversial comments during the referendum campaign suggesting the country “get rid of” a judiciary she called “a firing squad”.
Meloni and justice minister Carlo Nordio have rejected calls for their resignations after failing to convince Italians of the need to overhaul the country’s fiercely independent judiciary in a plebiscite that has been interepreted as a wider vote against the government.
