Word: prodis
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This is how an Italian government ends. One-by-one, each Senator was required to say out loud whether he or she wanted the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi to stand or fall. It was the final evening act in a day's worth of high and low drama in the ornate chambers of the Italian Senate on Thursday. There were bombastic speeches by party members defying their leaders' orders on which way to vote. Former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, who'd brought on the government crisis by yanking his support from Prodi, choked...
...appeared evident to most that Prodi had lost his slim working majority in the Senate on Monday when Mastella announced that he was pulling out of the coalition following a magistrate's filing of influence-peddling charges against him and his local politician wife. Most expected Prodi to promptly submit his resignation, but the sometimes stubborn 68-year-old former European Union president challenged his fellow lawmakers to the individual oral vote on Thursday. After the vote, Prodi submitted his resignation to President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, who now has the task of either searching for Parliamentary support...
...probably makes it more difficult for Napolitano to find consensus for a caretaker government to usher in a badly needed electoral reform before going back to the polls. A vote without altering the current system will most likely produce a similary fragile majority, regardless of which side wins. Indeed Prodi was on the verge of a government crisis for nearly his entire 20-month reign. The former economics professor had similarly been pushed from power in 1998, after having beaten Berlusconi two years earlier...
Most expect that the next showdown at the polls will feature Berlusconi and Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, who was Prodi's No. 2 back in 1996-98 administration but is no longer close in the same camp. There are reports that Prodi will team up with small parties from the far left to try to stave off Veltroni's rise, which would no doubt bring on more nasty infighting. Many believe that a caretaker government made up of moderates from both center-left and center-right is necessary to bring about the reform necessary to bring more stability...
...long tapped to take over the center-left from Prodi is Rome mayor Walter Veltroni. He talks the lofty rhetoric associated with American-style democracy - of change and courage - and cites Robert Kennedy and Barack Obama. But it is telling that Veltroni did not challenge the older Prodi for the right to lead the charge against Berlusconi in 2006, though he was far more popular. Instead, he waited his turn. Now that his moment is arriving, Veltroni should resist the temptation to cut deals with the leaders of small parties - the Mastellas of the left, right and center...