ITALY HAS had other non-party, technocratic leaders in modern times: Carlo Ciampi, Lamberto Dini and Mario Monti, all of whom came into office with more illustrious cvs than Giuseppe Conte. Mr Conte was an unknown law professor when, in 2018, he was tapped by the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) to lead its populist coalition with the hard-right Northern League. Yet none of the other technocrats succeeded in heading a second government, as Mr Conte has done since last September, when the M5S switched partners to yoke itself to the centre-left Democratic Party. Not only that; Mr Conte has grown increasingly popular. Surveys by Ipsos, a polling firm, found that the prime minister's approval ratings shot up in March from around 50% to 61%, the same figure as recorded again on June 11th. That was clearly because of covid-19, which may seem odd. On March 9th Mr Conte imposed one of Europe's strictest lockdowns, and his government's handling of the crisis was scarcely faultless. But within Europe Italy was the first country badly hit by covid-19, and Italians seem not only to have made allowances for that, but to have appreciated the way Mr Conte took responsibility for managing the crisis.
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