Italy's centre-left wants Prodi to stay on (2nd Roundup)

Feb 22, 2007, 23:35 GMT

Outside view of Chigi Palace, headquarters of Italy\'s government, in central Rome, Wednesday 21 February 2007, after Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned following the government\'s defeat in a Senate vote on foreign policy. Prodi tendered his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano after holding an emergency cabinet meeting in Rome. EPA/ALESSANDRO DI MEO

Rome - Italy's centre-left parties backed Romano Prodi on Thursday, saying the prime minister has enough parliamentary support to remain in office.

Prodi's coalition partners unanimously approved a programme proposed by the prime minister for any future government in a special session Thursday night, government spokeswoman Silvio Sircana said. The approved 12-point plan includes tenets of Italy's controversial foreign policy, which sparked Prodi's resignation Wednesday.

'I am convinced that there is a majority. I see the Prodi government going to parliament, where it may win a vote of confidence and continue with its job,' Anna Finocchiaro, a party whip of the Union, the biggest parliamentary group within the ruling coalition, said earlier in the day.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano was holding crisis talks with party leaders and institutional figures on Thursday and Friday, with a decision expected by the weekend.

Prodi stepped down on Wednesday after nine months in office after losing a key vote in parliament's upper house over his government's foreign policy.

The government-sponsored motion received just 158 votes in favour, two short of the required majority of 160.

Prodi's coalition partners were expected to ask Napolitano to reject the premier's resignation during consultations scheduled to take place on Friday afternoon.

Opposition leaders have called for a snap election, but political experts say this option is unlikely.

'I don't think it will happen. Italy needs to change its electoral system first and ensure that the new law produces more stable governments in the future,' Franco Pavoncello of Rome's John Cabot University told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Gianfrano Pasquino of John Hopkins University told Sky Italia television he expected the president would ask Prodi to stay on, but only after ensuring 'he has a workable majority' in the Senate.

Giovanni Sartori, one of Italy's leading constitutional experts, said the president could decide to form an 'institutional' or 'technocrat' government backed by an enlarged majority.

'The last thing to do would be to go to the polls,' Sartori told Sky Italia.

Prodi assumed office in May of last year after narrowly defeating outgoing premier Silvio Berlusconi in April's general election, the closest in modern Italian history.

A convoluted electoral law approved by Berlusconi in the final weeks of the past legislature ensured that a future government would be guaranteed a comfortable majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but not necessarily in the Senate.

Prodi had been commanding a wafer-thin majority in the upper house and lost Wednesday's vote because two far-left dissident lawmakers refused to back it in disagreement at Italy's peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan.

Napolitano began his round of consultations on Thursday morning by meeting the presidents of the two branches of parliament, Fausto Bertinotti and Franco Marini.

Experts were tipping Napolitano to ask Prodi to stay on or to try and form a new government. Other options include setting up an 'institutional' or 'technocrat' transitional government headed by a respected individual with no strict party affiliation.

Most centre-right opposition parties want Prodi to go. But the Catholic UDC, a small but influential party that has been distancing itself from Berlusconi since last year's election defeat, has said it may decide to join a new government, but only if there is 'discontinuity' with the previous administration.