KEY POINTS:
ROME - Normal service seemed likely to be restored in Italy yesterday after the head of state, President Giorgio Napolitano, told the Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, to go back to Parliament and ask for a vote of confidence. If he obtains a majority in both houses, he will be back in power.
Napolitano's reprieve came at the conclusion of a desperate week in Italian politics. On Thursday the centre-left coalition led by Prodi lost a vote in the upper house on foreign policy by two votes, plunging the political world into chaos. Hours later the Prime Minister told the President that he was resigning. Napolitano, the first ex-communist ever to be President, said he accepted it "with reserve".
Two days of intensive talks followed. Napolitano announced yesterday he was returning Prodi's resignation and giving him another chance to obtain a working majority.
"It was clear that at the moment there is no concrete alternative to sending the present Government back to Parliament to verify through a confidence vote that it has the necessary majority," he told the press.
Ever since winning last April's general election by a mere 25,000 votes, Prodi has been dreading a disaster of the sort that befell him on Thursday.
The proportional voting system fashioned by Berlusconi's outgoing Government gave him a healthy majority in the Camera, the lower house, but a tiny one in the Senate.
His centre-left coalition is composed of a wild assortment of parties, ranging from former Christian Democrats in the centre to two communist parties on the left; it includes Greens and Trotskyites, close allies of the Vatican, and anti-church secularists.
Silvio Berlusconi claims that the only thing they have in common is their desire to keep him out of power.
But last week that was not enough. The Government angered left-wing MPs by refusing to reconsider a Berlusconi agreement with the United States permitting the US to build a second military base in the north-eastern city of Vicenza.
It angered them further by agreeing to keep around 1200 troops in Afghanistan. Last weekend a huge but peaceful demonstration in Vicenza galvanised the left into pressing the Government harder on the bases issue, as well as on the Afghan mission.
The Foreign Minister, Massimo d'Alema, a firm friend of the US, warned the left that if they did not vote for the government in the Senate, "we will all go home". Only two left-wing MPs abstained in the vote but three "senators for life", including 87-year-old Giulio Andreotti, a dominant figure since the 1950s, also failed to support the Government and that was enough to send it down.
Yesterday Prodi said: "I will go to Parliament as soon as possible with the support of a cohesive coalition determined to help the country at this difficult stage and speed up the economic recovery that is under way."
Earlier, he had induced all parties in the coalition to sign up to a 12-point policy programme and promise to back it. But the Opposition was rubbing its hands in the expectation of another humiliation for the left.
Professor's troubled times
* Romano Prodi is the only person to have beaten media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi at the polls, and he has done it twice - once in 1996 and again in April last year.
* Both times he faced difficulties with his hard-left allies. In 1998, he lost a confidence vote when the communists deserted him over social policy. This time he lost a vote on a resolution backing Italian foreign policy, including its mission in Afghanistan, opposed by many on the left.
* Prodi has no party of his own but is a figurehead for the splintered centre-left.
* He has served a five-year term as President of the European Commission.
* A law graduate who taught at Harvard, he is referred to as "the professor".
- INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
