The Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League have edged closer towards forming a government in Italy in a move that would pave the way for a prime minister from one of the two populist parties.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League, and his M5S counterpart, Luigi Di Maio, said in a joint statement that talks early on Thursday on defining a government programme and setting priorities had been positive.

They said significant progress on the cabinet’s composition and who would lead it had also been made “in view of constructive collaboration between the parties with the aim of deciding everything as quickly as possible in order to give a response and a government to the country”.

Giancarlo Giorgetti, a politician with the League for more than 20 years who has been mooted as a potential prime minister, was also at the meeting, as was Vincenzo Spadafora, a deputy with M5S.

Although Salvini and Di Maio are not entirely out of the running, others mentioned in the Italian media as potential prime ministers include Enrico Giovannini, a former chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer who made a name for herself after her defence of Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister found guilty in 2002 of complicity in a mafia-linked hit against a journalist.

Bongiorno also defended Raffaele Sollecito, who alongside the American Amanda Knox was cleared in 2015 of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher.

Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star Movement leader, gives a statement in Rome on Monday. Photograph: Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images

Salvini, who has mostly campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, could potentially take the role of interior minister with Di Maio as foreign minister.



The role of integration minister, scrapped by Matteo Renzi’s government in 2014, may also be re-established and filled by Toni Iwobi, a League politician who became Italy’s first black senator when he was elected in March.

A meeting between the two parties’ technical representatives will be held later on Thursday, the statement said.

The latest development breaks the nine-week stalemate that prevailed after inconclusive national elections in March, but was only made possible after the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party had teamed up with the League as part of a centre-right coalition that won the largest share of the vote, agreed to step aside late on Wednesday.

Berlusconi, 81, had been the stumbling block in earlier negotiations between the League and M5S, with the four-time ex-prime minister seen as a potent symbol of the corruption they have campaigned against.

The Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, on Wednesday gave the two parties a 24-hour deadline after they unexpectedly sought more time to clinch an agreement amid the threat of a caretaker government.

It is unclear when the two parties, which between them won more than 50% of the March vote, will announce their programme and cabinet lineup. They on Thursday asked Mattarella to give them until early next week.