Italy was plunged into the all-too-familiar waters of constitutional crisis yesterday when prime minister Romano Prodi resigned after losing a crucial foreign policy vote in the senate.
President Giorgio Napolitano now has the delicate task of plotting the way forward since Mr Prodi's resignation yesterday leaves the president with a variety of constitutional options, ranging from calling on Mr Prodi to form a new government through to the dissolution of parliament and an early election.
When Mr Prodi narrowly won a desperately close general election last April, it was immediately obvious that his majority was most at risk in the senate, where he looked to the non-aligned life senators to bolster a majority of just one vote.
In yesterday's vote, the senate was asked to approve the government's foreign policy, with specific reference to the deployment of 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan and to plans to expand a US airbase in Vicenza, northern Italy.
The government received 158 votes, two short of the 160 needed to see the motion approved. Prestigious figures such as former president Francesco Cossiga and seven times prime minister Giulio Andreotti were among those life senators who either voted against the government or abstained.
Arguably even more damaging was the decision of two of the government's own majority, Rifondazione Communista hard-line leftists Ferdinando Rossi and Franco Turgilatto, to vote against.
"Today's vote just confirms that a government that stretches from Trotskyites to [ ex-Christian Democrats] Clemente Mastella and Franco Marini simply cannot hold together, especially when it comes to foreign policy," said a jubilant Fabrizio Cicchitto, deputy co-ordinator of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.
On Tuesday, foreign minister Massimo D'Alema, who presented the motion yesterday, had warned that failure to secure approval could lead to the government's downfall.
Although Mr D'Alema argued that the Prodi government was keen to register a change of foreign policy from the strongly pro-US line pursued by the Berlusconi government, that reassurance was not enough to persuade all of the radical left. Mr D'Alema went on to suggest that US foreign policy had caused profound "lacerations" within many of Europe's largest and most important democracies.
Supporters of the Italian right-wing parties Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale mobilised their supporters to demonstrate outside the prime minister's residence, the Palazzo Chigi, last night as Forza Italia's leader in the senate announced: "There is no Prodi government any more."
Last Saturday 80,000 protesters, including exponents of the radical left which forms part of the government, staged a protest in Vicenza, against plans to increase the US military base there.