Prodi notches up another success with his man elected as president

ITALY : Italian prime minister-elect Romano Prodi recorded another significant success on the long road to government house …

ITALY: Italian prime minister-elect Romano Prodi recorded another significant success on the long road to government house when former Italian Communist Party (PCI) member Giorgio Napolitano (80) was elected president of Italy yesterday.

Mr Napolitano, the first ex-communist to be elected state president, was the candidate proposed by Mr Prodi's centre-left Union coalition, the narrow winners of last month's general election.

With Mr Napolitano due to be sworn into office next Monday, the way is clear for Mr Prodi to be nominated prime minister. Under the constitution, the prime minister is nominated by the president. Yesterday Mr Prodi said he expected that he would be nominated early next week, with his new government ready to face a confidence vote by May 23rd.

The interregnum between last month's elections and the formation of the government has been especially long because it coincided with the expiry of the seven-year mandate of the outgoing president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Complicating matters was the fact that President Ciampi has long felt that the new prime minister should be nominated not by him but rather by his successor.

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The election of Mr Napolitano represented the third major success for Mr Prodi in the last two weeks as he defied his narrow parliamentary majority to force through his coalition's choices, firstly for the posts of speaker in both houses of parliament and then for president. Not surprisingly, the election of Mr Napolitano was fiercely criticised by defeated prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who used the occasion to again contest the result of last month's general election.

"We wish President Napolitano the best of luck, but we do not agree with the manner in which he was elected, which was imposed upon us by the left.Today the left completed a clean sweep of occupation of the highest offices in the land, ignoring the fact that half of the country voted against them.When the parliamentary commissions sit down to count the [ general election] votes, we'll prove that the left does not have the majority of the votes, but rather the moderates [ centre-right] do."

Mr Napolitano was elected on the fourth ballot when he received 543 votes from a maximum of 990 senators, deputies and regional representatives. The centre-right registering its discontent with 347 empty ballot papers.

For his part Mr Prodi argued that the centre-right had "missed an opportunity" to vote with the centre-left. "We're very satisfied because we got the maximum number of votes we expected and we were very happy about Napolitano, who will be the president of each and every Italian."

Mr Napolitano was an anti-fascist militant during the second World War, a member of the PCI since 1945 and was first elected to parliament in 1953 at the age of 28. He has long been hailed as a voice of moderation on the left. A strong supporter of the post-Berlin Wall reform process of 1989, which saw the PCI transform itself into Democratic Left, abandoning the hammer and sickle symbol along the way, Mr Napolitano has also served as minister of the interior, as speaker of the lower house and as a member of the European parliament.

His relatively moderate views and his good English saw him tour the US, addressing students at Harvard and Yale, even at the height of the Cold War. Mr Napolitano also broke new ground when criticising the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.