Rome Coalition: Old Face, New Physique?

After three weeks of leisurely but painstaking search, potential Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita appears to have found the formula for a rebuilt Italian government: an old face with a new physique.

Italian commentators agreed Thursday that De Mita had persuaded Socialist Bettino Craxi to support the re-creation of the same five-party coalition that has governed Italy for most of this decade.

De Mita’s Christian Democrats meet today with the Socialists and the coalition’s three junior partners, the Social Democrats, Liberals and Republicans, in a session designed to curry favor. Next is the hard bargaining over the apportionment of ministerial portfolios.

De Mita’s goal, through protracted talks with other parties, is establishment by mid-month of Italy’s 48th government since World War II as an institution strong enough to rule until the next scheduled elections, in 1992. That is ambitious in the context of a volatile political system in which agreements often collapse, but the 60-year-old De Mita, who heads the dominant Christian Democrats, is accomplished in back-room maneuvers.

What will be different this time, De Mita avers to both his partners and to parliamentary foes headed by the Communists, is that his government will be based on an actual program and not simply the common interest of ruling parties.

To replace a government of convenience that collapsed three times in less than eight months under caretaker Prime Minister Giovanni Goria, De Mita proposes solutions to old-line problems that not only have plagued Italy for years but also have helped promote the instability of successive governments.

Support for Reforms

Elements of the program that the coalition partners say they will support include economic, labor and institutional reforms.

De Mita’s promises range from greater administrative efficiency to approval of local taxing authority and the right of cities to decide for themselves how to spend the moneys they raise. A reinvigorated development program for the Italian south, where unemployment is higher and income is lower than in the rest of the country, also figures among De Mita’s initiatives.

In his first venture beyond the complex web of his own party, De Mita has won support for institutional reform that would curtail secret ballots in Parliament and limit the ease with which government opponents can force confidence votes.

Established 40 years ago as protection for a young, post-fascist democracy, the secret vote has been much abused by legislators waging internecine warfare. Goria, bushwhacked repeatedly by members of his own party, was forced to call a humiliating procession of on-the-record confidence votes to win what should have been routine approval of the government budget.

De Mita has forged common economic ground to attack an alarming government budget deficit with tax reforms and better enforcement programs in a nation where tax evasion is rampant.

After a winter of chaos in Italian airports and train stations because of wildcat walkouts, there is also broad agreement for new laws to regulate the right to strike among workers in essential public services.

Although Goria’s government was moribund beforehand, its actual collapse came last month when the Socialists and Social Democrats withdrew over a Christian Democratic plan to resume construction of a nuclear power plant in Montalto, near Rome. Craxi charged that the plant violated an anti-nuclear policy approved by Italian voters at a referendum last fall.

The Christian Democrats argue that the plant was not meant to be covered by the general referendum, and De Mita has prepared a compromise. Construction of the plant will resume, but Montalto will become a gas-powered complex built so that it could eventually be converted to a nuclear power facility.