Former communist Giorgio Napolitano (80) was elected Italy’s new president on Wednesday, gaining an absolute majority in a Parliamentary vote that underlined the country’s political divisions.
The election of centre-left leader Romano Prodi’s candidate was bitterly opposed by the conservatives of outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who marked their protest by voting with blank ballots.
The election of the senator for life and former Parliament speaker now clears the way for Prodi to form a government early next week, five weeks after winning a bitterly contested general election.
A confident Prodi said his new government could be sworn in by the new president ”between Sunday and Tuesday” of next week.
That would be followed by a Parliamentary vote of confidence before the following weekend.
Napolitano received 542 votes in the fourth-round ballot, the first to be decided by an absolute majority.
All but a handful of the other votes cast by the 1 009 ”Grand Electors” — comprising both houses of Parliament and regional representatives — cast blank protest ballots.
The incoming president, who turns 81 next month, received a two-minute ovation from Parliament when the lower house speaker formally declared him elected.
But Berlusconi voiced his opposition, telling reporters immediately after the vote: ”This majority does not correspond to the wishes of Italians.
”We don’t see him as corresponding to the need for an impartial candidate,” he said, adding that he wished the new president good luck.
Questioned by reporters early on Wednesday, Napolitano — a senior member of the former communist Democrats of the Left — insisted he would be an ”impartial” president as guarantor of the country’s Constitution.
”Otherwise I wouldn’t have accepted,” he said.
In a sign of the difficulties posed by Berlusconi’s opposition, the previous three rounds of voting over Monday and Tuesday ended in a stalemate, with no candidate acquiring the two-thirds majority required for those votes.
Napolitano’s fortunes changed dramatically once the vote was thrown open to an absolute majority in the fourth round, with Prodi able to count on 542 votes, well in excess of the 505 required.
The Parliamentary stalemate has delayed Prodi’s accession to power, since his government has to be sworn in by the new president.
The election is likely to prompt the resignation of President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi either later on Wednesday or on Thursday, in order to facilitate a quick transfer of powers. His mandate is due to expire on May 18.
In that event, Senate speaker Franco Marini, holder of the state’s second-highest office, will take over as interim president until Napolitano is sworn in.
Though closely associated with Prodi — he was interior minister in his first government in 1996 — Napolitano will need to use all his experience to quell Italy’s troubled political climate.
For a start, he will have to reassure Berlusconi’s coalition of his impartiality after Prodi failed to win cross-party consensus for his nomination.
Berlusconi’s House of Freedoms coalition refused to endorse his candidacy, seeing him as too left-wing, and campaigned instead for a more centrist candidate with more cross-party appeal.
However, under pressure from the biggest party in his coalition, Prodi insisted on Napolitano, a former communist member of the Democrats of the Left. Last week, Prodi had been forced to drop the nomination of Massimo D’Alema, the party chairperson, after fierce opposition from Berlusconi.
The Democrats of the Left was formed after the disbanding of the Italian Communist Party following the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
Prodi said he was happy the vote showed his disparate coalition presented a united front. ”It was an election which has given us all the votes we hoped for; we voted as a unit,” he said.
”I’m disappointed that the House of Freedoms have not understood that Napolitano will be a president for all Italians,” he added. — AFP
