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Italy heads toward political stalemate

Italy lurched towards a full-blown political crisis yesterday as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi alleged widespread fraud at the polls and election winner Romano Prodi forged ahead with plans for a new government.

Berlusconi, who initially demanded a recount of 43,000 contested votes after Prodi won, demanded the check be extended to returns from all 60,000 polling stations, as well as more than 1 million votes deemed invalid.

Prodi, leader of a center-left coalition, accused Berlusconi of delaying tactics and told supporters at a victory rally in his home city of Bologna that the media magnate politician should "go home."

"The result must, and will, change because there has been endless vote rigging in different places, all over Italy," Berlusconi told reporters late on Wednesday after visitingPresident Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to inform him of "innumerable irregularities" in the two-day election on Sunday and Monday.

"Did you think you'd got rid of me," he joked.

It was unclear what transpired at the 70-minute meeting with the president, but Italian newspapers citing government sources said Berlusconi had hoped to get Ciampi to sign a special decree ordering an unprecedented recount of the 1,100,000 spoiled votes. Ciampi is believed to have refused.

Berlusconi's fresh allegations prompted Prodi to make a late-night phone call to Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu, whose ministry was responsible for overseeing the vote.

Berlusconi has kept up a barrage of electoral fraud allegations and refused to concede defeat for his center-right government ever since the results on Tuesday showed Prodi as the narrow winner.

The prime minister has the backing of two of his House of Freedoms allies, the National Alliance and Northern League, although the third -- the Christian Democrat UDC -- has maintained a dignified silence.

"We can't go on like this for the next two months," the Corriere della Sera quoted its leader, outgoing parliament speaker Pier Ferdinando Casini, as saying.

As Berlusconi's allegations threw Italian politics into limbo, Prodi pressed ahead with talks with his coalition partners on forming a government.

The victor said he had received congratulations from foreign leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac, but none yet from US President George W. Bush -- an ally of Berlusconi -- and Pope Benedict XVI.

But Prodi's admission on Wednesday that Italy will have to wait until next month for a new government has done little to quell the growing sense of a crisis.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Italy's president, whose duty it is to swear in the new government, ends his seven-year term of office on May 18. Ciampi, 85, has said he wants his successor to do the swearing in.

The first task of the new parliament, which is due to convene on April 28, will be to elect the new president.

But Italian media reported that the swearing in of the new government will rest on the ability of a sharply divided parliament to agree on a presidential candidate, and may be hostage to drawn-out negotiations.

Prodi squeaked into power by a margin of 25,000 votes in the lower house Chamber of Deputies, where a bonus system under Italy's electoral law automatically gives his Union coalition 55 percent of the seats regardless of the margin of victory.
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