ITALY:Italian state president Giorgio Napolitano last night called on Senate speaker Franco Marini to attempt to resolve the political crisis prompted by the fall last week of Romano Prodi's centre-left government.
Mr Marini has been given a mandate to explore the possibility of forming an interim, cross-party government that would be called on to introduce electoral reform prior to a general election. His appointment is in line with the widespread view that the electoral legislation, introduced by the Berlusconi government in 2005 and representing a return to pure proportional representation, is deeply flawed.
By lowering the electoral threshold to 2 per cent, the legislation enabled smaller parties with only a handful of seats to hold the balance of power. Thus the ex-Christian Democrat UDEUR party, with just 1.4 per cent of the vote and three out of 322 seats in the Senate, was instrumental in bringing down Mr Prodi's nine-party coalition last week.
Many commentators had argued that the president would prove reluctant to dissolve parliament and call an early general election, just 20 months after Mr Prodi took office.
In a brief statement yesterday, the president explained that he had given a short term, exploratory mandate to Mr Marini not only because of widespread calls for electoral reform but also because the electoral law is due to become the object of a referendum calling for its abrogation. "Public opinion and significant representatives of civil society and the financial community have, in recent times and even in these days, expressed their concern that without these reforms (to the electoral law), it would be impossible to achieve the necessary political stability and institutional efficiency."
In his attempt to find a common platform from which to enact electoral reform, Mr Marini faces an almost impossible task. Centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi, buoyed by opinion polls that suggest his Freedom House coalition would prove an emphatic winner of any early election, yesterday continued to press for the dissolution of parliament.
When Mr Marini begins his round of consultations this afternoon, Mr Berlusconi will call on him to abandon his "exploration" and opt for an immediate election. The centre-right leader yesterday argued that the Italian constitution contains no norm for the formation of a government intended only to oversee elections. Ironically, he argued that the run-in to the election could be adequately handled by the outgoing government, led by his arch rival, Mr Prodi.
If Mr Berlusconi was disappointed with Mr Napolitano's decision not to dissolve parliament, he received good news from a Milan court which yesterday acquitted him of "false accounting" in relation to the 1986-89 sale of food conglomerate SME, a sale that took place before his 1994 entry into politics.
The court deliberated for just five minutes before clearing him, arguing that the allegations no longer constituted "false accounting", given changes made to the law by Mr Berlusconi's own government in 2002.