Italy’s leading political powers may not have Giuseppe Conte to push around anymore.

That was the message Mr. Conte, Italy’s prime minister, sent Monday as he delivered an ultimatum to the populist government’s warring coalition partners.

In a remarkable prime time news conference, he told them that if they didn’t stop paralyzing the government, and derailing sensitive financial negotiations with the European Union, with their perpetual bickering, political point scoring and media propaganda, he would walk and bring the government down with him.

“I’m not here just to scrape by or drift,” Mr. Conte said, demanding a “clear and unequivocal choice” from the coalition partners as to whether they wanted to stay in power or not.

Mr. Conte, who is widely considered a puppet of his deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini, of the anti-immigrant League party, and Luigi Di Maio, of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, pulled his only string to get the Italian government on some sort of track.

The weeks leading up to last weekend’s European Parliament election saw a poisoning of the already tenuous relationship between the coalition partners. The results destabilized the situation even further.

Mr. Salvini, the hard-line interior minister and technically the coalition’s junior partner, had joined the government with 17 percent of a March 2018 vote but doubled his popularity last month to 34 percent in the European Parliament vote. Mr. Di Maio’s party lost about half of its support and finished with a crushing 17 percent.

The shellacking essentially validated Mr. Salvini’s role as the most powerful figure in Italian politics. In the days since the election, he has pressed his advantage — demanding the government act on his priorities including tax breaks, public works projects and still tougher measures to keep out migrants.

Mr. Conte, who often looks uncomfortable in the limelight that Mr. Salvini soaks up, sought to assert himself as the responsible figure in the government.

The prime minister said the internal squabbling risked compromising continuing discussions with the European Union to avoid disciplinary procedures over the country’s failure to reduce its public debt as required by European Union rules.

Rather than shrinking, Italy’s debt has been rising, and forecasts by the European Commission suggest the debt will continue to rise. This week, the bloc’s Commission is likely to begin disciplinary procedures against Italy.

“Our government, my government,” Mr. Conte said, correcting himself, was formed to answer the fears of Italians who had been left in the margins and deliver on a promise of change.

But a climate of permanent campaign, he said, had led to bitterness, with the competing political leaders still concentrating on filling piazzas and “collecting likes” on their Facebook pages.

“We can’t work,” he said.

Critics of the government say it has never really been working.

Italy’s liberal opposition has argued that the coalition is unable to focus on the business of government, leading to the erasure of Italy’s minuscule growth, an erosion of international investor confidence, and political isolation in Europe.

“Conte has admitted the paralysis, the disaster and the failure of his government that we have been denouncing for weeks,” said the opposition leader, Nicola Zingaretti, of the Democratic Party, at a political event Monday evening. “All this has an immense cost for the country that Italians are dramatically paying.”

Even Mr. Salvini of the League party lamented in the days leading up to the European Parliament vote that it was hard to get anything done with the Five Star Movement.

“Regarding Five Star,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, “I’m worried by a series of no’s in the last period.”

He said the Five Star politicians had stalled progress on devolving powers to the regions, instituting a flat tax and proceeding with a major high-speed train line between Italy and France that has broad support among business leaders of both parties.

Mr. Di Maio of the Five Star Movement, who acknowledged his defeat after the European Parliament vote, has seemed willing to work with the League.

But elements of his party are seeking to assert some independence and perhaps win back liberal voters. So they have expressed increasing discomfort with Mr. Salvini’s efforts to block migrants from entering the country and his proposals to criminalize aid ships who bring rescued migrants to Italian shores.

Despite Mr. Conte’s effort at tough talk, he still seemed like a pawn (“I can and want to do more,” he said). And Mr. Salvini, who had exceeded expectations in the European vote and emerged as the potential leader of the Continent’s nationalist forces, seems to hold all the leverage.

He is well positioned to win new elections with a new alliance of post-fascists and conservatives poached from the weakened and often ailing former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. All he has to do is keep applying pressure. And that is exactly what he did after Mr. Conte’s remarks, at another political rally outside of Mantova.

He said his electoral victory had handed him a mandate, adding, “I don’t argue, I don’t answer back, I don’t — and we don’t — have time to lose in polemics.”

Then he said, on Facebook, “We have never stopped working.”

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