De Mita’s Resignation Won’t Alter Visit : Amid Political Chaos, Italy Awaits Bush

President Bush will get a first-hand look at a polished but increasingly vexing Italian political merry-go-round this week when he comes from Washington to visit an ally without a government.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said Saturday that the substance of the three-day Bush visit would not be altered by Friday’s resignation of Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita. Italian observers, for their part, saw no chance that prideful politicians could resolve their squabbles to allow formation of a new government before Bush’s arrival Friday. De Mita, then, will greet Bush as caretaker while the battering search for a new leader swirls around them.

Since the list of De Mita’s potential successors is almost identical to a list of his prime ministerial predecessors, not much will be lost in talks expected to focus on joint and sometimes fruitful Italian-American assaults against organized crime and drug trafficking.

Bush will also see Pope John Paul II in a rare Saturday evening audience at the Vatican, and will lead Memorial Day observances at an American military cemetery south of Rome before leaving Sunday for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Brussels.

Maneuvering to form the 49th Italian government since World War II will begin in earnest this week with consultations between President Francesco Cossiga and leaders of more than a dozen political parties represented in the Italian Parliament.

There seems little chance Cossiga will ask De Mita to form a new government and no chance that he would ask someone else to try before the Bush visit: No one wants to have to present Bush with both a caretaker prime minister and a prime minister-designate.

Amid an unprecedented wave of national development that has carried their country to the front ranks of the world’s industrial powers, Italians increasingly tell pollsters that they are embarrassed and fed up with a political system that seems wedded to instability. De Mita, a 61-year-old Christian Democrat, took power last year hoping to remain in office until scheduled elections in 1992. He lasted 13 months, and even that is longer than the average life span of an Italian government in the last 40 years.

“We have reached the lowest point in a long history, filled with ambushes, daggers and poison, which does not serve Italy well in preparing for a new Europe,” commentator Eugenio Scalfari noted Saturday. “The united Europe of 1992 is getting closer, but, with sovereign foolhardiness, we are moving in the opposite direction. Between the Alps and the Pyramids, we have, unfortunately, chosen Beirut as our model.”

Under De Mita, long-promised reforms to modernize the political system died aborning. So, too, was his five-party coalition unable to effectively reduce a government deficit projected at $90 billion.

In recent weeks De Mita and erstwhile Socialist allies led by former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi have exchanged abusive salvos, each blaming the other for governmental impotence and parliamentary intransigence.

Just now, Italy is dozens of smoke-filled rooms away from a new prime minister. Jockeying begins in the context of June 18 elections for the European Parliament. Craxi, the nation’s most ambitious loose cannon, is a possibility. So is former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who will greet Bush this time around as caretaker foreign minister.