The Wall Street Journal-20080125-Italy Is Cast Adrift as Prime Minister Prodi Resigns
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Italy Is Cast Adrift as Prime Minister Prodi Resigns
ROME -- Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned after narrowly losing a confidence vote in the Senate, thrusting Italy into months of uncertainty before a government with a clear political mandate can take power.
His 161-156 defeat marks the official end of Mr. Prodi's 20-month- old government. It also sets in motion a familiar process in Italian politics: The country's president, Giorgio Napolitano, can either call snap elections or see if he can find a transitional prime minister capable of scraping together a majority from the current parliament.
A lot hangs on that decision. Mr. Napolitano is determined to keep Italians from heading to the polls until parliament rewrites the country's electoral law. The law, rushed through by Mr. Prodi's predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, allows even small parties to gain representation. That has crowded parliament with so many parties that broad coalitions are needed in order to form a majority.
Mr. Prodi's coalition was composed of nine separate parties, several of which had less than 2% of the vote but wielded outsize power because they could bring down the government by yanking their support.
His drive to revise election rules means Mr. Napolitano is likely to try to appoint a transitional, or "technical," government tasked with drafting a new electoral law. Approving the law could take months, however. Meanwhile, Mr. Berlusconi, the leader of the center-right opposition, is clamoring for immediate elections, betting that a vote now would easily carry him to victory.
The current crisis has offered a dramatic display of the state of Italian politics. It began when Justice Minister Clemente Mastella resigned last week after prosecutors named him as the target of a corruption probe and placed his wife under house arrest.
Mr. Mastella, who heads a tiny centrist party with three senators, said Monday that he was pulling his support from Mr. Prodi.
For some, the collapse of the government drove home a larger point about the dwindling support among Italians for political parties of all stripes. "The one real weak link in Italian society is the trust people have in politicians," said Nicola Piepoli, a sociologist and pollster.
Mr. Prodi had pleaded with senators not to pull the plug on his government, arguing that such a move risked leaving the country rudderless at a difficult moment for the global economy. "Ending this government is a luxury Italy can't afford," he said during his address.
Italy's economy appears to be spiraling into a slowdown even faster than many of its European peers, and that could put a strain on its shaky public finances. Italy's public debt is 105% of gross domestic product, the largest in Europe
The Bank of Italy this month cut its 2008 growth forecast for the Italian economy to 1% from 1.7%, predicting Italy will continue to underperform the rest of Europe, citing a worsening outlook for the global economy.
