Giuseppe Conte

Giuseppe Conte: The Lawyer Who Governed Both Ways

On 9 March 2020, a law professor almost nobody had heard of two years earlier went on television and shut down a country of 60 million people. Giuseppe Conte described what he had done as "the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic." He was not boasting. He was a private-law specialist who had spent his adult life parsing obligations and contracts, and he had just written the most consequential emergency decrees in modern Italian history — as the compromise candidate two hostile parties reached for because neither would accept the other's leader.

A Southern Childhood

He was born on 8 August 1964 in Volturara Appula, a village near Foggia in Puglia, deep in Italy's south. His father Nicola was a municipal employee; his mother Lillina Roberti taught elementary school. The family later moved to San Giovanni Rotondo, and Conte attended the Classical Lyceum "Pietro Giannone" in San Marco in Lamis — the old humanist curriculum of Latin, Greek and philosophy that has furnished the Italian professional class for a century.

He read law at Sapienza University of Rome, graduating with honours in 1988 and qualifying as a lawyer in 1992. What followed was a long, itinerant postgraduate education — or at least a long list of institutions: Yale Law School and Duquesne University in 1992, the International Culture Institute in Vienna in 1993, the Sorbonne in 2000, Girton College, Cambridge in 2001, and New York University in 2008. The last of these would become a problem.

The Professor

Conte's career before politics was almost entirely academic. He taught private law at Roma Tre, LUMSA, the University of Malta and the University of Sassari, later holding professorships at the University of Florence and at LUISS in Rome, and sat on the board of trustees of John Cabot University. From 2010 to 2011 he served on the board of the Italian Space Agency; between 2013 and 2018 he was vice president of the Bureau of Administrative Justice — a serious post, and an obscure one. He had never run for anything.

The Accidental Premier

In February 2018, Luigi Di Maio of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement floated Conte's name as a possible minister. The March election produced a hung parliament, and talks between Five Star and Matteo Salvini's hard-right League ground on for weeks. On 21 May both parties proposed Conte as prime minister — acceptable precisely because he belonged to neither. Negotiations then collapsed over the Eurosceptic economist Paolo Savona, whom President Sergio Mattarella refused as finance minister; Conte resigned his mandate on 27 May before taking office. By 31 May a deal was patched together, and he was sworn in on 1 June 2018.

Conte I was the strangest coalition in postwar Europe: internet-organised populists governing with a nativist party. It delivered the citizens' income, capped at €780 a month and drawing 2.7 million applications, and a 15% flat tax for small entrepreneurs. It also delivered the September 2018 "Salvini decree," sharply restricting protections for migrants. Conte, positioned between the two, coined his own description: *l'avvocato del popolo*, the people's lawyer. Journalists preferred another label — "techno-populism," technocratic manner wrapped around anti-establishment content.

Two Governments, Two Partners

In August 2019 Salvini, riding high in the polls, filed a no-confidence motion designed to force elections and make himself premier. It failed spectacularly. Conte resigned on 20 August — and was promptly invited to form a second government, this time with the centre-left Democratic Party. The same man, the same office, an entirely opposite majority. Few European leaders have ever performed that manoeuvre.

Conte II launched a Green New Deal in September 2019 and pushed a constitutional reform cutting the size of parliament, ratified by 70% of voters in a September 2020 referendum. Then Italy became the first Western country overwhelmed by COVID-19.

The Pandemic Premier

Conte banned flights from China in late January 2020, imposed regional lockdowns on 22 February, and on 8–9 March extended the lockdown to the entire national territory — a step no European government had taken since the war. His approval rating climbed above 70% by March 2020. In May the "relaunch decree" committed €55 billion to recovery. In July 2020, at the European Council, Italy secured €82 billion in grants and €127 billion in loans under the Next Generation EU package, an outcome Conte pursued in close alignment with Spain's Pedro Sánchez.

Foreign policy under Conte was idiosyncratic. He pressed for repealing sanctions on Russia, cultivated an unusually warm relationship with Donald Trump — crediting him with "100 million dollars of medical aids" during the pandemic — and was the last G7 leader to congratulate Joe Biden.

The Fall

In January 2021 Matteo Renzi withdrew his small Italia Viva party from the coalition. Conte survived the confidence votes — 321 to 259 in the Chamber, 156 to 140 in the Senate — but the Senate margin fell short of an absolute majority. He resigned on 26 January, saying: "We have been going through a phase of real emergency... The widespread suffering of citizens... require a clear perspective." Mario Draghi replaced him.

Party Leader

Having governed without ever belonging to a party, Conte joined the Five Star Movement on 28 February 2021. After a public rupture with founder Beppe Grillo over the movement's direction, members elected him president on 5 August 2021 with 92.8% of the vote. In 2022 he clashed with Di Maio over military aid to Ukraine; Di Maio and his allies left in June to found "Together for the Future." That July, Conte pulled Five Star's support from Draghi's government over its stimulus package, triggering the crisis that ended in Draghi's resignation on 21 July. At the September 2022 election the movement, widely written off, took 15.4% nationally — 52 deputies and 28 senators. Conte entered the Chamber for Lombardy 1.

Why Giuseppe Is Called a Genius

The case for Conte rests on a single, genuinely unusual political skill: he is the only Italian in the modern era to have led two consecutive governments with opposite majorities, moving from a coalition with the hard right to one with the centre-left without an election in between and without visibly changing himself. That requires a specific cognitive gift — the lawyer's ability to hold two irreconcilable clients' positions in mind, find the narrow ground on which both can be represented, and draft language neither will reject. His inaugural Senate speech in June 2018 is a small masterpiece of that method: he redefined "populism" as listening to the people's needs and "anti-establishment" as removing old privileges, and concluded that on those definitions his partners "deserve both these epithets." He did not argue with the labels; he rewrote them.

The counter-case is substantial and should not be softened. Conte's reputation is one of procedural agility rather than original thought; he produced no doctrine, no distinctive body of scholarship, no policy programme identifiably his own — his two governments pursued contradictory agendas set by his partners. His credentials have been questioned directly: New York University, which he listed among his places of study in 2008, stated that "a person by this name does not show up in any of our records as either a student or faculty member." A CV padded with prestigious institutions is the opposite of genius; it is the anxiety of someone who suspects the record is thin. And the pandemic decisions that define him were made under conditions where almost any competent government would have converged on similar measures. What is defensible is the phrase "brilliant improviser." "Genius" is a stretch the record does not support.

Legacy

Conte's four years remade Italian politics twice: he legitimised the Five Star Movement as a governing force, then rebuilt it as a conventional left-populist party after it had been declared dead. He also demonstrated something uncomfortable about modern democracies — that a figure with no electoral base, no party and no ideology can hold the highest office longer than most elected leaders, simply by being the person everyone else can tolerate.