The Italian parliament voted last night to ratify the entry into NATO of three former Eastern Bloc countries. What should have been a routine approval of NATO membership for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland was turned into a full-blown political drama by personal resentments that had nothing to do with NATO enlargement and that threatened to bring down the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
At the end of the day the government had a comfortable majority, with most of the centre-right opposition abstaining and the pro-NATO Democratic Union for the Republic (UDR) giving its support from the opposition benches. But a fierce personal antagonism between Mr Francesco Cossiga, a former president and the founder of the UDR, and the justice spokesman of the Left Democrats, Mr Pietro Folena, left the outcome of the vote in doubt until yesterday afternoon and sparked a frenetic series of political consultations in an effort to stave off a government crisis.
Mr Cossiga had previously promised to support the government on the NATO vote, thereby filling the gap in the government's parliamentary majority left by Communist Refoundation, which normally supports Mr Prodi but opposes the expansion of NATO.
Last week, Mr Cossiga withdrew his offer of support after taking offence when Mr Folena criticised his conduct as interior minister in 1978, when he failed to save his party colleague, Mr Aldo Moro, from the hands of Red Brigades' kidnappers. Mr Cossiga has always been extremely sensitive to criticism on this subject and he was further enraged when President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro gave his public support to the view that the real brains behind the Moro kidnapping had still not been identified.
The withdrawal of Mr Cossiga's support presented the opposition leader, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, with a golden opportunity to topple the centre-left government of Mr Prodi, which does not have a majority in the lower house of parliament without the votes of the Communists. In the end, Mr Cossiga relented after forcing Mr Prodi to make a humiliating request for opposition votes in parliament and to admit that his government did not enjoy a stable majority on foreign policy issues.
His decision also spared parliament from the embarrassing prospect of blocking NATO enlargement, despite the fact that the vast majority of MPs support it. The vote brought an end to what one Italian newspaper dubbed a "summer psychodrama", but it did not prevent Italy from cutting a very poor figure on the international stage.
Monday's session of the debate was so sparsely attended that the MPs participating were frequently outnumbered by the Eastern Bloc diplomats watching from the public gallery. The country risked stalling a process supported by all its NATO allies for reasons that had nothing to do with NATO and everything to do with personal rancours and the mysteries surrounding Italy's terrorist past.
To cap it all, the debate was suspended throughout the afternoon yesterday, giving the impression that Italian MPs were more interested in watching the Italy-Austria World Cup match than attending a debate that had almost brought down the government. Italy beat Austria 2-1, but the Italian parliament emerged as the real loser.
The Italian government faced strong criticism yesterday over Monday's escape of two Mafia bosses from a packed courtroom in Salerno in southern Italy.
"What happened is very serious . . . It is the umpteenth proof of the inefficiency of Italy's prison system," said Mr Ottaviano Del Turco, head of parliament's anti-Mafia commission.