The New York Times-20080126-Italian Leaders Consider Changing Law Before Elections
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Italian Leaders Consider Changing Law Before Elections
The day after Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned, Italy's leaders began gearing up Friday for a new fight: whether to hold immediate elections, an option considered favorable to former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, or first fix an electoral law blamed for the current instability.
President Giorgio Napolitano, as required by the Constitution, began holding consultations on Friday with the many political parties on how to proceed. That process will last through Tuesday.
Though he has remained silent on the crisis that ended Mr. Prodi's 20-month, center-left government, Mr. Napolitano has spoken of the urgent need to fix the election law. He is thus expected to try to form a temporary government of technocrats, charged with making those changes.
But Mr. Berlusconi and his allies on the center-right -- leading in opinion polls and eager to regain the power they lost to Mr. Prodi in the 2006 elections -- are arguing for an immediate vote. They may have enough power in Parliament to block any temporary government that Mr. Napolitano proposes.
There is no alternative to an immediate return to the ballot box, to give life in the shortest time possible to a strong government, said Sandro Bondi, the head of Mr. Berlusconi's political party, Forza Italia.
Mr. Berlusconi knows he can win, said Roberto D'Alimonte, a University of Florence political science professor who has advised the left on the election law. He knows he can win with any electoral system, even the present one. All he wants is a date for the elections. So in my opinion he will try to make things difficult.
But the center-left, even if beaten in a weeklong crisis that ejected them from power, vowed to block quick elections, saying they would be in no one's interest but Mr. Berlusconi's.
There is a need to avoid quick elections, which would throw the country into a dramatic crisis, Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, said after Mr. Prodi lost a confidence vote on Thursday night. Mr. Veltroni, head of the new center-left Democratic Party and a likely opponent to Mr. Berlusconi in any elections, added that elections under the current law would not guarantee the stability and innovation that Italy needs.
In the months before the last elections, in April 2006, Mr. Berlusconi changed the nation's electoral law, which had been passed several years before by a popular referendum. The law has faced broad criticism because it favors Italy's many small parties -- which critics say fragments and dilutes power -- and makes it difficult to obtain a clear majority in Parliament's upper house, the Senate.
Even Mr. Berlusconi's allies have criticized the law. In fact, his justice minister, Roberto Calderoli, responsible for drafting it, called it an obscenity that roughly means hogwash. In fact, many experts believe it is possible that Mr. Berlusconi might also get stuck with the same slender majority in the Senate that helped doom Mr. Prodi, possibly leading to several more years of an unstable government.
Meanwhile, several names were floated as a possible interim prime ministers, if such a government wins approval. Mr. Napolitano met Friday with one of them, the Senate president, Franco Marini, a Democratic Party member and a former union official.
Others considered as possible interim premiers included Mario Monti, president of Bocconi University in Milan and a former European Union commissioner for competition, and Mario Draghi, head of the Bank of Italy.
Despite being opposed to a temporary government, Mr. Berlusconi's allies floated the possibility of Gianni Letta, a deputy prime minister under Mr. Berlusconi and one of his top aides.
One person who has said he would not accept the job is Mr. Prodi, 68, who twice beat Mr. Berlusconi in elections and has fallen twice by defections in his own government. The recent crisis began Monday, after Mr. Prodi's former justice minister, Clemente Mastella, withdrew his support, leaving the government without a majority.
Even if you lose in Parliament by only one vote, that means this arrangement has lost, Mr. Prodi told reporters on Friday. My work now is to be a grandfather.
