By James Mackenzie -
ITALY’S political crisis looks set to worsen when parliament resumes this week after a bitter exchange between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his rival Gianfranco Fini brought the prospect of early elections closer. Berlusconi said he would appeal to the head of state, President Giorgio Napolitano to strip Fini of his office as speaker of the lower house following a scathing attack by his estranged former partner in a speech on Sunday. In a statement issued late on Monday after a meeting with Umberto Bossi, the head of his Northern League coalition partners, Berlusconi said Fini’s remarks were unacceptable and incompatible with his role as parliamentary speaker. “In the coming days, Prime Minister Berlusconi and Minister Bossi will request a meeting with the president of the republic to explain the grave situation with poses serious problems to the regular functioning of institutions,” the statement said. The exchange appeared to lessen the likelihood of a compromise between the two former allies, increasing the chances that Italy will go to the polls well before the next scheduled election date in 2013.
Berlusconi broke with the co-founder of his People of Freedom Party after months of increasing friction in July, leaving the government without a secure majority in parliament after 34 deputies and 10 senators backed Fini. He has sought to win back some of the rebels but has also declared that he will hold a confidence motion around a 5-point programme of measures including tax and justice reforms and would resign if he lost.
The timing of a confidence motion remains unclear but with the lower house of parliament set to resume today after the summer break and the Senate following a week later, a decisive showdown may be approaching. Fini has been a strong critic of a series of corruption cases that have hit the government but says he does not want to bring it down. On Sunday he said his group would not vote against a confidence motion but would seek to influence the final shape of the programme in parliament.
In spite of the acrimony between the 73-year-old prime minister and his 58-year-old rival, actual policy differences between the two are not great and the split was caused mainly by Fini’s impatience with Berlusconi’s tight control of the PDL. Whether Berlusconi will succeed in ousting him as speaker remains unclear and a source in Napolitano’s office said that no request for a meeting had been received by midday yesterday.
Italo Bocchino, one of Fini’s closest allies, rejected the notion that the president could dismiss the speaker of the house, saying that Berlusconi’s move violated the constitutional requirement for the separation of state powers. “The request by Berlusconi and Bossi is manipulative, improper and impermissible,” he said in a statement. He said it was Berlusconi himself who created the present system in which the head of one of the parties serves as speaker, in contrast with many other countries where the speaker is a senior figure above day-to-day politics.