The high-stakes negotiations to resolve Italy’s political crisis in the midst of a pandemic took a remarkable turn on Tuesday evening when the country’s president summoned Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, to begin talks to form a new government.

The development all but officially sounded the death knell on the tenure of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a previously unknown lawyer who had managed, with great ideological dexterity, to survive as Italy’s leader for more than two years and two governments, the first an alliance of hard-right nationalists and anti-establishment populists, the second with populists and the center-left establishment.