Prodi Stays Premier
February 24, 2007
Prodi had stepped down on Wednesday, nine months since assuming office, after losing a key foreign policy vote in the Senate, where his coalition enjoys a slim majority.
Napolitano had met with party leaders over two days of talks to figure out whether Prodi could re-form a stable government.
After meeting Prodi on Saturday, the Italian president asked the acting prime minister to stay in office and face a new vote of confident in parliament.
"There was no alternative," Napolitano said, adding that most party leaders agreed that early elections -- as demanded by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi -- would not change the situation under Italy's current electoral system, which currently favors individual parties at the expense of coalitions such as Prodi's.
Prodi meanwhile said that he would quickly face parliament.
"I will seek a vote of confidence as soon as possible, with renewed impetus and a united coalition," he told reporters Saturday, according to AP news service.
Set of commitments
On Thursday, the mild-mannered Prodi, nicknamed Il Professore, whipped his squabbling nine-party coalition into line by extracting a "non-negotiable" set of commitments from them. Prodi also received a boost from an Italian centrist Senator Marco Follini who was reported in a Saturday newspaper as saying that he would "probably" support the center-left in a confidence vote.
Two communist senators in Prodi's coalition refused to support him in Wednesday's vote which was called to test support for his government's foreign policy. The pair dislike his approval of a planned enlargement of a US military base and commitment to Italy's 2,000-troop deployment in Afghanistan.
Both were contrite afterwards, and one of them, Trotskyite Franco Turigliatto, was expelled from the Refoundation Communist party. The other, Fernando Rossi, a pacifist of the Italian Communist Party, pledged his loyalty to Prodi.
The Berlusconi factor
The specter of snap elections that might return conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi to power after just nine months in opposition appeared to be the main catalyst for the center-left's newfound cohesion.
Sergio Romano, a leading Italian political analyst, said: "Prodi is using an argument that is right now very strong: 'Do we want to help Berlusconi regain power?'" The Refoundation Communists "don't want to be considered responsible," he told AFP new service.