Craxi Expected to Quit Next Week; Christian Democrat Will Get Post

Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Italy’s longest-serving postwar leader, will resign next week and pave the way for an orderly turnover to a Christian Democrat under a long-planned agreement to share power, Socialist Party sources said Thursday.

The sources said that Craxi will summarize his more than three years in office in a speech to the Italian Senate on Tuesday, then present his formal resignation to President Francesco Cossiga immediately afterward.

The prime minister’s days in office have been numbered since July, when a government crisis forced him into an agreement with his Christian Democratic coalition partners to step down in March. Under the agreement, a Christian Democrat would take over leadership of the five-party coalition until regularly scheduled parliamentary elections in 1988.

Balked Last Week

Last week, however, Craxi balked at the imminent power transfer and said that he considered the July agreement “liquidated” and that early elections might be necessary.

But Socialist Party sources said he has reluctantly decided to go ahead with the plan to surrender the prime ministership without breaking up the coalition that has ruled since he became prime minister in August of 1983. They said he will disclose his intentions today at a meeting of leaders of the coalition parties. These, in addition to the Socialists and Christian Democrats, are the Liberal, Republican and Social Democratic parties.

There remained a slender chance that at the coalition meeting Craxi might still provoke a crisis, as he threatened to do last week, but the sources said this is highly unlikely. They pointed out that the only reason he could have for wanting to see the coalition collapse would be an expectation that his Socialist Party would gain by early elections.

Socialists Got 12%

But Italian voters traditionally punish leaders who can be blamed for provoking government crises, and such a move would probably hurt rather than help the Socialists. They received about 12% of the vote last June in the most recent provincial and municipal elections.

The Christian Democrats are the dominant coalition partner, with about 60% of the government’s seats in Parliament and 32% of the voters nationwide, slightly more than the Communists.

Although the party has not yet named a candidate for prime minister, speculation has centered on Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti, 68, who was prime minister on four occasions in the 1970s, and Ciriaco de Mita, 59, secretary of the Christian Democratic Party and a relative newcomer to Italian politics.