Italy's main centre-left party chose former Prime Minister Romano Prodi as its presidential candidate on Friday, igniting a battle with Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right that increases the likelihood of a snap election in the summer. Berlusconi's camp immediately rejected Prodi, one of the media tycoon's oldest political enemies, saying his election was likely to prevent any government being formed and could lead to new polls, possibly as soon as late June or early July.
It accused centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani of betraying a promise to propose a candidate it could accept and announced it was boycotting a presidential vote in parliament on Friday afternoon. A crowd of around 200 anti-Prodi demonstrators protested outside parliament and several parliamentarians led by Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, wore T-shirts marked "Not this" and "The devil wears Prodi".
The election of the next head of state to succeed Giorgio Napolitano, whose term ends on May 15, is a major step in efforts to break the stalemate since elections in February which left no party able to govern alone. The euro zone's third-largest economy has been without an effective administration for months while the election campaign and the long deadlock since have stalled any action to combat a recession that matches the longest since World War Two.
But the bitter battle over the presidency has underlined how hard it will be to reach political consensus on vital economic reforms or other issues such as an electoral law that is one of the main causes of the current impasse. The election left the centre-left as the biggest group in parliament but its failure to win a majority handed Berlusconi decisive influence over the intertwined negotiations for both a new government and the next president.
The former prime minister has repeatedly said the nomination of a broadly accepted presidential candidate was the only way to form a government capable of addressing Italy's problems and avoid an immediate return to the polls. He has several times rejected his old adversary Prodi, 73, an internationally recognised figure who is currently the United Nations envoy for Mali and the Sahel region.
Prodi's selection marked an about-turn for Bersani, after he failed to impose 80-year-old former Senate speaker Franco Marini on his Democratic Party (PD) as presidential candidate in a deal with Berlusconi. PD president Rosy Bindi said the unanimous choice of Prodi, a former European Commission chief, had removed the threat of a party split. "At this moment our country needs an institutional dialogue on reforms and this can happen if Romano Prodi is in the president's office," she told reporters. "He is more qualified than anyone else to do this."
But Fabrizio Cicchito, a close Berlusconi ally, suggested the choice had pushed the country closer to a new election. "If the PD is answering us in this fashion, it's not us choosing elections, it's the PD that's adopting a position of total opposition to us," he said.
The centre-right's boycott could fail to block Prodi's election if the centre-left manages to gather a handful of additional votes from other parties in the secret ballot, which has complex rules. It has 496 electors and needs eight others to reach the simple majority required in Friday afternoon's vote.
Marini fell far short of the two thirds majority of the 1,007 presidential electors that is required in the first three votes. Dozens of centre-left rebels cast blank ballots or voted against him in the first round on Thursday, sinking his candidacy and forcing Bersani to change tack. Centre-left parliamentarians were awaiting the fourth round when they hope to push Prodi through with the simple majority which is all that is required from that point onwards.
Bersani, who failed to win a viable parliamentary majority in February despite a big opinion poll lead beforehand, hoped that reaching an accord with Berlusconi would ease the path to the formation of a minority government. But furious PD opposition to any deal with the scandal-plagued billionaire, currently fighting two separate trials over sex charges and a tax fraud conviction, forced him to backtrack.
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