Italian election: president considering a technocrat government, sources say

With little indication that Italy’s rival political parties have the will to come together and form a coalition government following last week’s parliamentary elections, sources told Reuters that Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, is considering appointing a new technocrat government led by a non-politician.

Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left Democratic Party (PD) won a majority in the lower house, but no party won control of the Senate, Reuters reported.

Napolitano will step in if Bersani’s party is unable to join forces with either Silvio Berlusconi center-right bloc or the anti-establishment Five Star Movement led by former comedian Beppe Grillo, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

Neither rival party seems a likely partner for PD. Bersani has dismissed the idea of an alliance with Berlusconi and has invited the Five Star Movement to work with his party.

However, Grillo and the scientists, lawyers and formerly unemployed people in his party have rejected the idea of an alliance with a party of career politicians, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek:

The negotiations pose a dilemma for Grillo and his adherents, or so-called Grillini, as Five Star ran on a platform of expunging established politicians like Bersani from power.

The 5-Star Movement doesn’t like the idea of a technocrat government either.

On his blog today, Grillo said a technocrat premier would just be a "fig leaf" for the traditional parties, Reuters reported.

"Technocrat governments don't exist in nature but only political governments supported by parliamentary majorities,” he wrote, according to Reuters. “The Monti government was the most political government since the war.”

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