Word: spadolini
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Political crisis is as familiar to Italians as pasta, as regular as a strike, but the latest parliamentary high-wire act in Rome had even seasoned observers worried. His fragile five-party coalition government riven by infighting over economic policy, Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini had to try twice earlier this month before his resignation was accepted by an irritated President Sandro Pertini. In the resulting political vacuum, Pertini last week acted quickly, foregoing the usual ritual of extensive political consultations. Within 48 hours, he had made up his mind. Summoned to the Quirinale Palace for a trumpet fanfare...
...political veteran, the stocky and pugnacious Fanfani received the call at a time when Italy's feuding parliamentary factions seemed hopelessly deadlocked. The collapse of the Spadolini government, which had a prime minister from the tiny Republican Party and was the first postwar administration not to be headed by a Christian Democrat, began while Spadolini was in the U.S. Back in Rome, two contentious Cabinet members began trading public insults, and with that, the Prime Minister's authority dissolved. Spadolini called for the resignation of the battling ministers. They balked; in the tradition of Italian coalition politics, Cabinet...
...President François Mitterrand and Greece's Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou swept to power last year on a wave of popular enthusiasm for promises of change, and Felipe González has now joined that socialist surge. Even in Italy, where centrist Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini still leads a shaky five-party coalition, the Socialists under Bettino Craxi have made steady gains in the polls and are poised to offer an alternative to the two major parties, the Christian Democrats and the Communists...
...cold-blooded murder of Dalla Chiesa, who was widely known and respected for his part in the fight against Italy's Red Brigades terrorists, stunned Italians. Mourners at Palermo's ornate Basilica of San Domenico pelted Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini and members of his Cabinet with coins and jeered them for their failure to act more effectively against criminal bloodshed...
...Craxi miscalculated. Interrupting his vacation in the Dolomites, Italian President Sandro Pertini, 85, rushed to Rome and asked Spadolini to form a new government. A lifelong Socialist, Pertini then reportedly reminded Craxi that in Italian politics the party that precipitates early elections usually suffers the most at the ballot box. Ultimately, Craxi appears to have been influenced by an equally persuasive fear: that the Communists would abstain in key parliamentary votes, allowing a minority government without the Socialists to stay in power...