ITALY’S Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte resigned Tuesday following a blistering attack on coalition partner Matteo Salvini. Conte said Salvini had been “irresponsible” in creating a new political crisis for Italy for “personal and party interests.”

After 14 months of bickering, Italy’s government collapsed, plunging a key European nation already hobbled by financial fragility and political chaos into a renewed period of crisis.

The government coalition of the hard-right, anti-migrant League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement came apart after a mutinous power play by Salvini, the League leader, who is also the country’s deputy prime minister and interior minister.

This month, Salvini, 46, announced that he was fed up with the Five Star’s incompetence and inaction and made a bid for early elections, asking Italian voters to give him unrestrained power to consolidate his grip on the country.

Salvini may yet get his wish. But for now there remains the chance that his lengthening list of political enemies could form a new coalition government that freezes him out of power. At least immediately, things haven’t gone as Salvini had planned.

In an extraordinary session of parliament Tuesday that interrupted the usually sacrosanct Italian summer recess, Conte accused Salvini, seated beside him with chin raised, of “political opportunism” for pulling his support from the government in hopes of taking power for himself.

The betrayal had thrust the country into a “vortex of political uncertainty and financial instability,” Conte said. Rather than bothering with a confidence vote that  Salvini had pushed on him, the prime minister said he would tender his resignation to Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, collapsing the government and leaving Salvini with no immediate path to power.

Mattarella will now begin the process of consulting with party leaders to see if a new majority can form yet another Italian Government. If not, he is likely to call for early elections.

Salvini responded that he did not fear the judgment of Italians, unlike others in Parliament who were, he said, clinging to their jobs out of fear of losing elections. “We aren’t scared,” he said.  (SD-Agencies)