Prodi seeks support for new government

Italy’s caretaker prime minister Romano Prodi summoned his allies to a late night meeting tonight to see if they could commit themselves to backing him convincingly enough to possibly put together another government.

Mr Prodi’s summit of coalition party leaders came just hours before their planned appointment with president Giorgio Napolitano, who is looking into which politicians might have enough backing in parliament for a new government.

After nine months of struggling to control feuding coalition partners, Mr Prodi resigned yesterday, following an embarrassing loss in the senate on his centre-left government’s foreign policy.

Prodi aides said he called the meeting to ask his allies for a binding commitment to a policy programme in hopes that a show of unity would attract support from outside the coalition and increase its majority in parliament.

“Any lawmaker who can identify” with Prodi’s forces “is welcome to join,” said Anna Finocchiaro, a senator with a former Communist party which is the biggest party in Prodi’s coalition.

Mr Prodi narrowly defeated incumbent Premier Silvio Berlusconi in elections last year to end five years of conservative rule.

Italy’s complex election law gave Prodi a fairly comfortable majority in the chamber of deputies, but only a paper-thin majority in the senate, where his bid to get Communists and Greens to back his foreign policy failed yesterday.

With a Senate that Mr Prodi cannot fully control and a diverse coalition that ranges from Communists to Christian Democrats, any new Prodi government supported by the same forces would be dogged by instability.

To avert the risk, some centre-left party leaders were looking to centrist lawmakers who have left the Belusconi’s centre-right bloc.

If Mr Prodi can convince Napolitano he has enough support to control parliament, the president could ask him to try to form another government. Or Napolitano could tap anther politician or an institutional figure above the political fray.

If any of those possibilities fails to be workable, Mr Napolitano, as head of state, can call for new elections, which now are due in 2011.

Observers say that mr Napolitano would be unlikely to call elections now. Many political leaders have lamented the proportional representation system, which is seen as encouraging small parties and creating instability.

“Giving Prodi a new mandate is the obvious way to go, but it is an insidious one. It’s necessary to avoid the same mistakes and contradictions that have led to this downfall,” said Stefano Folli, a leading Italian analyst.

Mr Berlusconi wants early elections or a broad-coalition government.

“I don’t think there are any senators in this parliament willing to jump onto a sinking ship,” he said.

Berlusconi spokesman Paolo Bonauiti said any new Prodi government would be “warmed over vegetable soup.”

Mr Prodi had been facing rebellion from his coalition’s radical leftists, who oppose the government’s military mission in Afghanistan and the planned expansion of a US base in northern Italy.

The political crisis came as the government planned to sell the struggling Alitalia state-run airline, and overhaul the pension system and raise the retirement age, seen as crucial to lift the European Union’s third-largest economy.

Italy’s economy was starting to pick up, with an unexpected surge in fourth-quarter growth.

The government’s collapse did not have an immediate strong impact on financial markets.