Italy:At the end of a difficult week which saw his government defeated on seven motions in one day, Italian prime minister Romano Prodi has defiantly vowed to remain at his post.
His nine-party centre-left coalition is deeply divided over the terms of the budget bill going through parliament and has also been shaken by a corruption investigation involving both the prime minister and justice minister Clemente Mastella.
Mr Prodi hit back at those "who dream the government will fall", saying: "I'm sorry to disappoint them. I'm here and I'm staying here to fulfil my political and ethical responsibility. I'm here not just to survive but rather to govern."
As he heads into another potentially delicate week of budget voting, Mr Prodi promised that he would "personally and directly" follow the budget through parliament.
His defiant words, seemingly aimed at his fractious extreme-left allies, were delivered in Milan at the constituent assembly of the newly born Democratic Party (PD), a merger of the centre-left's two largest formations.
Mr Prodi will be the president of the new party which is due to be led by the popular mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, the runaway winner of a primary election held earlier this month.
Although Mr Prodi's term of office does not expire until 2011, most commentators feel his deeply divided coalition will not last until then.
The prime minister argued that his government's instability and indeed its narrow general election success of April 2006 were both partly the fault of the electoral reform hurriedly introduced by the Berlusconi government on the eve of the election.
Calling that reform a "law born to make it impossible to govern", Mr Prodi urged his heir apparent, Mr Veltroni, to immediately consult with allies and opponents with a view to introducing badly needed electoral reform before any new general election is held.
Meanwhile, the government came in for further bitter criticism over the weekend when Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, president of industry lobby Confindustria, complained that the government "could not cut two centimetres off a tie", let alone cut costs. "The problem is that we have a country which hasn't been governed for 12 years."