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Italian Leader to Lose Party Post, Periling Coalition

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Times Staff Writer

Against a backdrop of lofty rhetoric and savage infighting, Italy’s largest political party is in the throes of a leadership change that could mean an early death for the coalition government led by Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita.

Delegates to a congress of the Christian Democratic Party, which has been Italy’s party of government for four decades, will vote today to replace De Mita as party secretary and leader.

Arnaldo Forlani, the elegant, 63-year-old former prime minister, is the party’s choice to succeed De Mita. Forlani, who has a reputation as a cautious and patient mediator, represents the conservative wing of the party, whose members range from moderate leftists to traditionalist Roman Catholics.

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When De Mita became prime minister last April, he argued that holding that post and the party leadership simultaneously would lend stability and efficiency to his reform effort. However, the Christian Democrats, who have served in every one of Italy’s 47 postwar governments, have preferred that the party leader not be prime minister; they believe this arrangement reduces the room for political maneuvering.

In fact, De Mita’s five-party coalition has proven to be weak, unable to remedy such problems as a growing national deficit and poor public services; nor has there been any sign of the long-promised party renovation.

De Mita, a polished tactician and scarred political realist, came to his party’s 18th congress over the weekend ready to relinquish the party post he has held since 1982. Still, he hoped to see his own candidate, legislator Mino Martinazzoli, elected to replace him, thereby keeping command within the party’s left wing.

Instead, Forlani’s candidacy was forced on De Mita by Forlani’s centrists, by defectors from his own faction and by the party’s right wing, led by Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti.

In voting tonight, the congress may elect De Mita to replace Forlani as party president--a sinecure--but even that would not restore the prime minister’s lost political authority.

It is not clear how much power De Mita, shorn of his party post, will be able to exert in government over the shifting factions of his party or centrist coalition partners, who are disgruntled at what they consider his inflationary surrender to labor union demands last month.

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After 10 months in an office he has said he hopes to hold from two to four years, De Mita has achieved only one successful reform: abolition of the secret vote in Parliament, which had enabled maverick coalition legislators to undercut government legislation with impunity.

The aftermath of the congress may nudge the Christian Democrats away from any possible De Mita-fashioned alliances with Italy’s Communists and closer to their Socialist government partners. “We offer the Socalists solid ground, not quicksand,” Forlani told the congress.

The bespectacled, silver-haired Forlani is seen as a unifying figure within the party.

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