Italy's president was holding crisis talks with political leaders yesterday to see if Romano Prodi, who resigned as prime minister after nine months in power, can still head a government or must be replaced.
Prodi stepped down on Wednesday evening after an embarrassing parliamentary defeat of his government's proposed foreign policy program, including its plan to keep Italian troops in Afghanistan. He is staying on in a caretaker role.
"Comrades, all go home," crowed the headline in right-wing daily Il Giornale run by the brother of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Under Italy's Constitution, President Giorgio Napolitano now must find a way out of the impasse.
He was spending yesterday in consultations with party and parliamentary leaders -- a process one newspaper called a "Russian roulette" for Prodi, as the unpredictable result will determine his political future. There are three main scenarios:
If Napolitano finds enough support for Prodi among center-left parties, he could ask him to either form a new government or go to parliament with his present Cabinet for a confidence vote; a victory would allow him to remain in office.
If support for Prodi is not strong enough for him to carry on as prime minister, Napolitano could ask someone else, possibly Interior Minister Giuliano Amato, to form a caretaker government of experts with cross-party backing.
If no agreement is found on who should be prime minister, Napolitano would be forced to dissolve parliament and call early elections.
Many observers say that Napolitano would be unlikely to call early elections since they would be far ahead of their 2011 schedule and would be held using the current electoral law, which many political forces want to reform before a new vote.
Analysts said any Prodi government would be extremely weak and vulnerable to bitter infighting among its allies, who disagree on just about everything from Italy's military missions abroad to gay rights.
"Even if there is another Prodi government it would be hanging by a thread and would not last long, as the reasons for tension abound," said Gianfranco Pasquino, political science professor at the Bologna center of John Hopkins University.
Prodi, 67, was heading the 61st Italian government since 1945.
After his election last April, he enjoyed a brief honeymoon but his popularity soon plummeted as he pushed through a deficit-cutting 2007 budget to bring Italy in line with EU requirements.
Despite continued bickering within his coalition, his resignation came as a surprise.
The vote in the Senate was only intended as a motion of support for the government's foreign policy, but Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema turned it into a test of the executive's strength, giving Prodi little choice once the motion failed to pass. Prodi only has a one-seat majority in the Senate, and the revolt of two senators in his coalition was enough to put the government in a corner.
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