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Italian PM survives Senate vote

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi on Wednesday survived a close vote of confidence in the Senate, ending a weeklong political crisis after his shock resignation.

The 67-year-old former European Commission chief, serving his second stint as prime minister, is expected to sail through another vote today in the Chamber of Deputies, where he has a comfortable majority.

Prodi won by 162 votes to 157. Two senators whose votes were uncertain ahead of the ballot, independent Luigi Pollaro and opposition centrist Marco Follini, supported Prodi.

Four of Italy's seven unelected senators for life -- including 97-year-old Rita Levi Montalcini, who returned from a trip to Dubai for the vote -- widened the margin of victory.

Prodi's disparate center-left coalition, which won a general election 10 months ago by a hair's breadth, was thrown into crisis last week when the prime minister resigned after losing a vote of support on foreign policy issues.

Two communist senators opposed to Rome's military mission in Afghanistan and to the planned expansion of a US airbase in northern Italy sparked the crisis by withholding support.

Shaky support from communists proved Prodi's undoing during his first stint as prime minister in 1996 to 1998.

President Giorgio Napolitano refused Prodi's offer to resign and called for the confidence vote. Prodi rallied his coalition around a 12-point "non-negotiable" pact before agreeing to stay on.

Taking the floor as the debate opened on Wednesday, the embattled prime minister backpedaled on a bill that would grant legal status to unmarried couples including gays.

In an apparent gamble aimed at garnering support from the Catholic centrists in his center-left majority and the opposition -- at the expense of far-left groups who promote the legislation -- Prodi said that in presenting the bill to parliament, the government "has done its duty."

Parliament must now seek to "build a text for an ample convergence [of views]," he said.

The prime minister, fighting for his political survival, made a policy speech on Tuesday in which he did not mention the thorny subject.

The Corriere della Sera newspaper commented on Wednesday that Prodi took "great care ... not to broach subjects that could create divisions."

The opposition ridiculed Prodi's conciliatory stance.

Center-right leader and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was quoted as saying: "Poor soul, what more could he say? If he wins ... he won't last long in any case."

Gianfranco Fini, head of the right-wing National Alliance, said Prodi's speech was of "disconcerting insufficiency [because he] was afraid of irritating a single senator."

The outcome of the Senate vote had been uncertain up until the result was announced.

"We are one or two votes ahead at the most," Refoundation Communist Senator Rina Gagliardi said before the vote. "And some senators keep changing their minds."

"There's no other country in Europe where things stay uncertain up to the final seconds, but in Italy we're like that," she said.

A poll by Corriere della Sera published on Wednesday found that nearly 40 percent of some 800 respondents think the Prodi government will fall within a few months.
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