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| - Italy's president called in former central banker Mario Draghi on Tuesday to help resolve a political crisis in the virus-ravaged country, after ruling parties failed to agree a new government. Sergio Mattarella's spokesman said he would meet Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, on Wednesday, when he is widely expected to ask him to take over as a technocratic prime minister. The centre-left coalition that has led Italy since September 2019 collapsed last month after a key partner withdrew, and Giuseppe Conte resigned as prime minister last week. Conte had hoped to return at the head of a new government to see Italy through a pandemic that has claimed more than 89,000 lives and devastated the economy. But the parties that support him, notably the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the centre-left Democratic Party (DP), were unable to patch things up with former premier Matteo Renzi's Italia Viva party, which quit the coalition last month. Mattarella said the collapse in their negotiations left only two options. He ruled out snap elections in the middle of a raging pandemic, and instead said he would help form a "high-profile government that should not identify itself with any political formula". The president, who as head of state is responsible for finding a way through political turmoil, has stressed the urgency of having a stable government during this extraordinarily challenging time. Italy was the first European country to face the full force of Covid-19 and is still suffering, with new data showing the economy shrank 8.9 percent in 2020 -- the biggest contraction since the end of World War II. More than 420,000 jobs were lost between February and to the end of the year, including 101,000 jobs in December alone, according to national statistics agency Istat. Italy expects to benefit from more than 200 billion euros ($240 billion) in European Union virus recovery funds -- but arguments on how to spend it triggered the current turmoil. A lack of political leadership during the current crisis has sparked concerns about whether Rome can meet the April deadline to submit its spending plans to Brussels. Draghi, credited with having saved the eurozone in the 2012 debt crisis, has long been cited by political watchers as the man to see Italy through the coming months. "The government programme will be 99 percent occupied by the pandemic and the recovery fund," Lorenzo Castellani, a political expert at Rome's Luiss University, told AFP. Asked if Draghi would have enough support from parliament, Castellani added: "Mattarella has used the only weapon that could avert the elections... he will find a majority." The president had tasked the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Roberto Fico, to broker the negotiations between the ruling parties and report back by Tuesday. Fico told journalists after meeting the president he had found no "unanimous willingness" to form a stable majority in parliament. The breakdown in talks prompted a round of finger-pointing from the main parties. The leader of MS5, Vito Crimi, accused Renzi of being "obstructionist", saying: "Their only objective has been to have more seats." But Renzi insisted the discussion had all been about issues, from the handling of the pandemic to the plans for recovery. The right-wing opposition coalition, which includes Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini's far-right League, has called for immediate elections, which they would expect to win. ams-ar/jxb
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