The leaders of the Five Star Movement and the far-right League are to announce their nominee to be prime minister of Italy’s first populist government at a meeting with the president. Italian press reports suggest Giuseppe Conte, 54, a lawyer and M5S member, is to take the job after Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, and the M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, ruled themselves out. The parties will also present their cabinet lineup and government programme to the president, Sergio Mattarella.

Speaking on Sunday, Salvini said: “We have agreed on the head and ministers and hope that nobody will veto a choice that represents the will of the majority of Italians.”

He had reiterated a day earlier that the prime minister would be neither Di Maio nor himself, but “a professional who contributed to the drafting of the contract”.Conte, relatively unknown in the political world, is a law professor at the University of Florence. He is Di Maio’s personal lawyer and the mastermind behind the anti-establishment party’s pledge to abolish more than 400 “useless laws” that it claims will cut bureaucracy and free up the economy.(theguardian)…[+]