Italian PM Letta to offer resignation today

Black clouds of instability returned to haunt the Italian political landscape yesterday following a meeting of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) which pulled the rug out on incumbent prime minister, senior PD figure Enrico Letta.

Mr Letta was effectively ousted, 136 to 16, in a vote won by new party secretary Matteo Renzi. Thus, just 10 months after taking office last April, Mr Letta will this morning offer his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano.

Given that the president has already made a statement in which he said that the Letta versus Renzi conflict is an internal PD matter, it seems probable that he will accept Mr Letta’s resignation, looking then to Mr Renzi to succeed him in accordance with the desires of the largest party in the current centre-right, centre-left coalition government.

President Napolitano has emphatically dismissed the idea that the current government crisis would prompt him to dissolve parliament and call Italy’s second general election in little over one year.

Youngest prime minister
All of this would suggest that 38-year-old Mr Renzi will be appointed as Italy's youngest ever prime minister within the next two weeks. This allows time for the constitutional perogative of presidential "consultations" and then for Mr Renzi to present himself in parliament for a crucial confidence vote. Thus for the third time in three years, Italy will find itself with a prime minister who has not gone before the national electorate before being appointed into office but, rather, one "indicated" by the president.

If President Napolitano does opt, as is his constitutional right, to immediately offer the job to Mr Renzi, he will do so in order to minimise the obviously negative impact, both on the markets and in the eyes of world opinion, of a bitterly contested general election campaign.

The choice of Mr Renzi, however, represents a major gamble since the current mayor of Florence has had no experience of government at national level nor has he ever been elected to parliament.

Many commentators had expected Messers Letta and Renzi to go head to head in a dramatic party meeting yesterday. In the end, Mr Letta threw in the towel mid-afternoon when he released a statement saying that he would not be attending the meeting but would rather await the outcome in government house.

He said that as a founding fathers of the PD party, he had no wish to see it bitterly divided, adding that he had never been an “enthusiast of duels”.

The longer the meeting went on, the wiser Mr Letta’s choice seemed as speaker after speaker made it clear that they believed that the time had come for him to pass the government baton to his new party leader, who had opened the debate by calling for “a new phase and a new government”.

Charismatic
Evidently, a majority of the party believe that the charismatic, energetic, potentially innovative Mr Renzi will be able to kickstart the coalition government back into life, at least for long enough to enact much desired changes, such as a new electoral law and the abolition of the Senate.

Mr Letta is expected to hold his last cabinet meeting this morning before travelling to the Presidential Palace to offer his resignation.

Last night, he confessed it was a bitter moment for him but he argued that he was convinced that “in 10 months, he had done his utmost in particularly difficult conditions” as leader of an unprecedented centre-right, centre-left coalition.