Salvini demands early election over political crisis

Deputy Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Salvini's call for an early election comes after he announced he would no longer support Premier Giuseppe Conte's 14-month-old populist government.

Pescara: Italy on Friday rapidly edged closer to an early election that could move the country farther to the right, with markets sinking amid political uncertainty and concerns that the country's already touchy relations with the European Union could suffer.

Deputy Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Salvini's call for an early election comes after he announced he would no longer support Premier Giuseppe Conte's 14-month-old populist government.

Conte demanded on late Thursday that Salvini, who is also interior minister and whose right-wing League party is the junior coalition member, layout his reasons in Parliament for refusing to back the government he helped form after 2018 elections that brought populists to power for the first time in Italy.

Although no new election date has been set, and the Italian president hasn't indicated if or when he will dissolve Parliament, a return to the ballot box could come as early as late October.

League senators on Friday pushed for a confidence vote in Parliament on Conte's government that the premier would likely lose, given Salvini's refusal to keep the coalition going.

Lawmakers had just left Rome for vacation, and it was unclear how soon the presidents of both chambers would call them back into session to hold a debate and a vote.

Salvini is impatient to formally pull the plug on the government.

"Millions of Italians work on August and mid-August. So if there is a crisis, any day lost is a day that harms Italy and Italians, so we need to hurry," Salvini told a sea of cheering supporters Thursday night in Pescara, a small city on the Adriatic.