This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/europe/italy-prime-minister.html

The article has changed 7 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 5 Version 6
Italian President Nominates Center-Left Official as Premier President of Italy Nominates Center-Left Official as Premier
(about 9 hours later)
ROME — President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday nominated Enrico Letta, the deputy head of the Democratic Party, as prime minister, tasked with forming a government to lead the country out of weeks of political impasse after inconclusive national elections. ROME — After months of political paralysis capped by a week of turmoil, President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday named Enrico Letta, a high-ranking official in the center-left Democratic Party, to form a broad coalition government to try to steer Italy out of political chaos and its worst recession since World War II.
Mr. Letta announced that he would consult with the country’s leaders on Thursday to discuss its “fragile and unprecedented” political situation, and ask for their support. And former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the great survivor of Italian politics, emerged as a kingmaker by default, having outlasted most of his adversaries.
“We paved the way to form a government that the country urgently needs and has too long waited for,” Mr. Napolitano said soon after Mr. Letta’s nomination. “It’s undeniable that this is a victory for Berlusconi,” said Giovanni Orsina, the deputy director of the School of Government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “He got what he asked for, from Napolitano’s re-election to a political government with broad, bipartisan support.”
Mr. Napolitano praised Mr. Letta’s cultural background, government experience and international standing, calling his profile “excellent” for the complicated task of guiding Italy in a turbulent time. He added that there was “no alternative” to his candidacy. In accepting his mandate Wednesday, Mr. Letta said that he would focus on employment and growth — unemployment is over 11 percent in Italy, rising to 38 percent for young people — but also that he hoped the tide in Europe was shifting against austerity policies that have deepened an economic slowdown in Southern Europe.
Mr. Letta listed unemployment and the economic crisis as among the top issues that the new government should address. He also said Italy needed to reduce the number of Parliament members, change its elections law and restore the credibility of its political class. He cited the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who in a speech this week had said that while reining in budget deficits through austerity was “fundamentally right,” it had “reached its limits” and needed “the minimum of political and social support.”
Mr. Letta, 46, is considered a moderate figure capable of reuniting the embattled, center-left Democratic Party with Prime Minister Mario Monti’s Civic Choice group and the center-right. Mr. Letta is a nephew of Gianni Letta, a close aide to Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister. Mr. Letta is a Democratic Party moderate, former government minister and former member of the European Parliament. At 46, he is poised to become one of Europe’s youngest prime ministers, but he is less a new-guard politician than a compromise candidate palatable to his own imploding center-left party and to the center right — a young facade on a political edifice in the throes of collapse.
He has held government posts related to European and economic affairs and has also been a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. “On paper, Letta is a good candidate,” Mr. Orsina said. “It’s a new generation taking power. But they certainly chose the most moderate young man, somebody who comes from the establishment.”
Former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato had also been named by Italian media outlets as a front-runner. “It’s going to be hard for him to change the bureaucratic structure, the state machine, because that is the main issue,” Mr. Orsina added, referring to a system whose members have traditionally been appointed through patronage. “If your pan has a hole, changing the handle will do little good.”
Mr. Letta said he would meet with political leaders on Thursday to gauge what kind of support his government might have. If he believes he can be successful, he will accept Mr. Napolitano’s nomination and present a list of ministers for his cabinet. He will then ask for a vote of confidence in both houses of Parliament. Mr. Letta must propose a cabinet and present it to Mr. Napolitano and then Parliament for a confidence vote in the coming days. The strength and duration of his government will depend on how broad a coalition he is able to forge.
Mr. Napolitano was re-elected president for an unprecedented second term over the weekend after lawmakers failed to choose an alternative candidate. His precondition for renewing his mandate was that the political parties overcome their differences to form a government. Mr. Letta would replace the caretaker prime minister, Mario Monti, who came into office during intense market turmoil in November 2011. Mr. Monti’s yearlong technocratic government improved Italy’s credibility in Europe, but he failed to muster the political support to push through changes to help invigorate Italy’s economy. He fell when Mr. Berlusconi withdrew his support in December.
Failure to do so would result in the dissolution of Parliament, new elections and his own resignation, Mr. Napolitano warned lawmakers at his inaugural address. Mr. Letta is seen as being capable of reuniting the beleaguered Democratic Party with Mr. Monti’s Civic Choice group, which took less than 10 percent of the vote in the national election in February, and the center right. Mr. Letta is the nephew of Mr. Berlusconi’s close aide, Gianni Letta.
Elections at the end of February split Parliament into three mutually hostile political groups, and efforts by the Democratic Party, which narrowly won the vote, to form a government were inconclusive. In an acknowledgment of growing popular anger at politicians, Mr. Letta said Wednesday that he wanted to reduce the number of lawmakers and restore confidence in Italy’s political class, which is running at an all-time low. The Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, a former comedian, won a quarter of the vote in February on a populist platform of disgust with the status quo.
Many Democratic Party lawmakers refused to make a deal with the party headed by Mr. Berlusconi, the controversial political leader who has dominated Italian politics for two decades. He was plagued by personal scandals and criticism that his government’s economic policies did not spare Italy the brunt of the euro zone crisis. Like the current Greek government, a three-party coalition in which historical enemies on the left and right have joined together out of fear of extinction and a lack of viable alternatives, Mr. Letta is potentially the last gasp of a political cycle that in Italy began in the early 1990s with the collapse of the postwar political order and the rise of Mr. Berlusconi.
The antiestablishment Five Star Movement, which won 25 percent of the national vote riding a wave of widespread frustration with and anger toward the political class, has refused to make any alliances. That much was clear last weekend when, in a sign of a profound lack of consensus or imagination, a deeply divided Parliament elected Mr. Napolitano, 87, to a second term as president — after failing to settle on a new face for the first time in Italy’s postwar republic.
Mr. Napolitano, 87, was elected for a second term on Saturday. He reluctantly accepted, chastising lawmakers for leading the country into political paralysis and telling them to quickly find a compromise or face the consequences. In the turmoil, the Democratic Party, which had placed first in the February election but without a strong enough majority to govern, collapsed. Its leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, quit after his party’s presidential candidates failed — and after two months of aborted attempts to form a governing coalition with the Five Star Movement, which has said it will not ally with anyone.
In a highly emotional speech, he also criticized politicians for failing to approve urgent institutional and economic reforms, even as Italy’s economy continues to shrink. The country is in the grip of the worst economic recession since the end of World War II. Mr. Bersani had rejected the overtures of Mr. Berlusconi to form a coalition with his center-right People of Liberty party. Mr. Letta, under the watchful eye of Mr. Napolitano, who has threatened to resign if politicians do not snap to attention, will have no such choice.
The current crisis, Mr. Napolitano said, is the result “of a long series of omissions and flaws, closures and irresponsibility.” But that does not mean that Mr. Berlusconi is strong. Indeed, his party is splintering, held together only by the force of his personality.
Though Italians have demanded deep-rooted changes of their political leaders and a renewal of the existing political system, such demands have fallen on deaf ears, he said. Responses have been slow in coming, and are distorted by political tactics and calculations. Politicians have ignored demands for greater transparency, moral rectitude and a significant reduction in the cost of politics, he added. That poses a huge challenge for Mr. Letta. “I think Enrico Letta has to show he has a lot of political personality, because it’s very, very hard to govern with Berlusconi without being put in a difficult situation,” said Stefano Folli, a political commentator for the business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

If Mr. Letta fails to form a coalition, Mr. Napolitano has the power to dissolve Parliament and call a new election, but analysts said that was a less likely outcome in the short term because new voting might yield the same divided results.
A growing number of Italians have lost patience with a political class they see as disconnected from a worsening economic reality.
“Italians are worried about short-term contracts in a stagnant job market, unemployment and this dead economy,” said Mario Vendemia, 31, whose temporary employment contract in a financial firm will be up next year. “And what do politicians do? They take time, argue, refuse to form a government, cannot choose a president.
“Napolitano is an honest and respectable man, but he is just a temporary patch to very serious issues,” Mr. Vendemia added. “The lack of strategy is what worries me the most: no plan to restart the economy, no plan to give us a sense of the future.”

Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.