The New York Times

Tuesday, April 18, 2000

Italy's Premier Shaken as Right Gains in Regional Voting

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

ROME -- Weakened by severe losses in Sunday's regional elections, Italy's center-left prime minister, Massimo d'Alema, submitted his resignation Monday night. But President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi rejected it and told him to consult Parliament.

D'Alema did not say explicitly that he would seek a vote of confidence in Parliament, but that is the usual procedure when a government is imperiled. He did say he would seek a mandate at least until May 21, when Italians are to vote in a referendum that seeks, among other things, to create a bipolar electoral system.

But the prime minister's newly invigorated center-right opponents want him to leave office right away. If D'Alema fails to retain his already slender majority in Parliament, Italy could be plunged into elections a year early.

Italy's center-right opposition leader, Silvio Berlusconi, received a huge backing in the elections on Sunday as his coalition won 8 of 15 regions. "The results are evident and indisputable; the government majority in Parliament is a minority in the rest of the country," Berlusconi said. He called for early elections to "restore to the people their sovereignty."

After discussing the sobering results with his Cabinet, D'Alema met with Ciampi. He argued that with the referendum in May, a new electoral law could emerge, dispensing with the current hybrid system that retains 25 percent proportional representation, Such a change, he said somewhat bitterly, would "guarantee the stability and authority of the government." But he promised not use the referendum as a "shield" to preserve his shakey hold on power.

Parliament will be in session Tuesday and Wednesday, but it is scheduled to recess during the Easter holiday.

The regional election results, tallied Monday, underscored the strength of the Polo, Italy's center-right bloc. They also emphasized the popularity of its leader, Berlusconi, a media tycoon who was elected prime minister in 1994. He tumbled from power less than a year later when his coalition partner, Umberto Bossi, leader of the separatist Northern League, pulled out.

This time, Bossi, who has scaled down his rebel platform from separatism to greater federalism, again joined forces with Berlusconi's center-right Forza Italia. As expected, their coalition held a firm grip on the affluent North. But Berlusconi's party, aligned with other small center-right parties, also won key regions to the south, including Lazio, the province of Rome.

Sunday was the first time Italians voted directly for regional presidents, who are akin, if slightly less powerful, to governors in the United States. Turnout was 72.6 percent, high by U.S. standards but lower than in the last regional elections in 1995, when 81.3 percent of registered voters took part.

The next parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2001. But on May 21 Italians are expected to vote again in a nationwide referendum that proposes eliminating the remaining quota of proportional representation in Parliament, a system that many analysts say has kept the Italian political system chronically unstable. If passed, the referendum would introduce a system that would force small parties to coalesce into two blocs on the right and the left. similar to that of Britain. But it is opposed by Berlusconi as well as some center-left politicians, who fear their small parties will become extinct in a winnowed system.

The election reform referendum is only one of many issues that have chiseled away at D'Alema's support.

"At its most obvious and banal level, the results reveal voters' rejection of the D'Alema government," said Lucio Caracciolo, a political analyst and editor of Limes, a bimonthly journal on geopolitics. "The center-left has failed to convince voters that they are doing anything about immigration or unemployment."

The heated, sometimes nasty campaign was waged not on local issues but a national agenda, marked most by the campaign of Berlusconi. The Forza Italia leader, a onetime cruiseship crooner, returned to his deckside roots for the campaign, cruising up and down the coast of Italy on a freshly painted luxury liner, keeping the spotlight firmly on his own, perenially tanned persona. Calling his 10-day campaign-at-sea "not a cruise but a crusade," he told small crowds invited onto his boat from Naples to Venice, "There is no one like me."

Berlusconi, 63, who among other things owns AC Milan, a soccer team, and Italy's three largest private television networks, has been investigated and convicted on separate charges of illegal campaign contributions and corrupt business practises like bribing tax officials (one conviction of false accounting was overturned on appeal in February) and still faces a battery of trials. But he has sought to portray his legal battles as political persecution by leftist prosecutors, and many Italian voters, who admire him as a self-made tycoon, do not seem particularly shocked by his trail of convictions.

D'Alema, who will turn 51 Thursday, entered the race confidently, predicting that his coalition would pick up at least one more region than it took in 1995, when the center-left won nine regions, three more than the center-right. He had hoped the election results would lend a stamp of legitimacy to his government, which was put together in a parliamentary maneuver in 1998, after a no-confidence vote ousted his predecessor, Romano Prodi.

D'Alema, a former communist and founder of the non-Marxist party Democrats of the Left, nearly lost a no-confidence vote of his own in December when his fragile coalition splintered. He survived that internecine battle but was left with an even slimmer majority.