Italian premier quitting after losing key support

Italian Premier Enrico Letta gave up the fight to stay in office after a power play by supporters of the dynamic head of his party, Matteo Renzi, to replace him as premier.

|
Riccardo De Luca/AP
Florence Mayor and Italian center-left Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi drives away as he is chased by reporters following a meeting with Premier Enrico Letta at Chigi Palace government office, in Rome, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2014.

Abandoned by an ambitious party rival, Italian Premier Enrico Letta announced Thursday he is resigning after losing essential support for his battered, 10-month-old coalition government.

Hours earlier, Matteo Renzi, the 39-year-old leader of Letta's Democratic Party, rallied party executives to an overwhelming vote for a change of command in the premier's office. The Florence mayor is a fast-rising star in Italy's political firmament and has been maneuvering for months to become an unusually young premier.

Renzi said it was time for "radical change" in order to pull economically stagnant and politically unstable Italy out of its "quagmire," insisting that Italy needs more decisive leadership than Letta has offered.

Milan's market barely reacted to the development, and was down by barely 0.17 percent.

Even in a country known for its political tumult, the last several years have been bumpy. Renzi would be the fourth premier since late 2011, as the country scrambled to regain the confidence of skeptical markets with tough austerity measures.

Making no comment on his bitter defeat, Letta said he would formally hand in his resignation on Friday. He has defended his short tenure, insisting in a last-ditch pitch to fellow Democrats on Wednesday that Italy's economy has just started growing again, even if slowly.

President Giorgio Napolitano, who has staunchly opposed calling for new elections, could conceivably ask Letta to try to win a vote of renewed confidence in Parliament to make the legislature, and not the Democratic Party, the arbiter of the premier's fate. But without most of his Democrats, the largest party in Parliament, Letta's chances of commanding a legislative majority appeared doomed.

Napolitano would likely ask Renzi to try to form a coalition solid enough to command a working majority in Parliament that could quickly enact pressing electoral reform and measures to create jobs, especially with youth unemployment hovering around 40 percent.

Those consultations will bring Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal-tainted former premier, back onto center-stage. Berlusconi's center-right Forza Italia party is Italy's second-largest party after the Democrats, and his lawmakers' backing will be crucial to Parliament's effectiveness.

Forza Italia said Berlusconi will lead his party's delegation to the presidential palace to confer with Napolitano.

Only last month, he made a deal with Renzi to back electoral reform. Both Renzi and Berlusconi are betting that overhauling the voting system so that the ballot box will yield clear winners, instead of the frequently fragmented coalitions it has so far.

Whether Renzi's power grab might alienate potential voters is a big unknown. Renzi told his party's executives he realizes there is a "risk he could be burned."

One of the Democratic leaders who opposed Renzi's gambit, Pippo Civati, said after the showdown: "I might be in the minority" but the party should "give the word back to the citizens" at the ballot box to determine who governs them.

Civati also worried that Berlusconi could do an about-face on the reform deal, robbing Renzi of his main potential achievement. "Let's hope Berlusconi doesn't want to change is mind," Civati said.

In response to critics who see him shamelessly going after power, Renzi insisted pulling the plug on the government wasn't about "the oversized ambition of Renzi." Just a week ago, Renzi has said he wasn't interested in taking Letta's place through a power play.

Italian voters could be irked that they aren't picking their government's leader at the ballot box. Letta didn't run for office, but was asked by Napolitano to try to end weeks of political stalemate that resulted from inconclusive elections exactly one year ago.

The last candidate for premier to be elected was Berlusconi in 2008. But the 2011 financial market crisis forced him to resign, and Napolitano then tapped economist Mario Monti to lead a non-elected government of technocrats. A year later, Monti's government collapsed after Berlusconi quit supporting him.

Renzi also might be handicapped by his experience in Parliament — zero. Before serving as Florence mayor, he was president of Florence province, a relatively minor post.

London-based analyst Wolfango Piccoli said "markets are likely to react positively to Renzi" becoming premier, because they figure "the pro-reform and straight-talking politician will re-ignite reforms."

A Berlusconi protege, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, who stuck with Letta's government even after Berlusconi defected, took a wait-and-see attitude toward a potential Renzi government.

"Either you do the big things or if you are going to do the little things, it's better to have elections," Alfano told reporters. "We're not in love with Parliament lasting until 2018," when elections are formally due, Alfano said.

He called it "Kafkaesque" that on Friday, the national statistics bureau was set to unveil figures backing up Letta's contention that during his embattled tenure Italy's economy had returned to growth after years of dismal performance. Still, Alfano likened the battered Letta government to "a ship caught between the waves of a tempest."

Colleen Barry in Milan contributed to this report.

___

Follow Frances D'Emilio at www.twitter.com/fdemilio

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Italian premier quitting after losing key support
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0213/Italian-premier-quitting-after-losing-key-support
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe