Italy’s Top Banker Heads Transition Government : Politics: Respected 72-year-old says he will appoint a new Cabinet today without consulting nation’s parties.

Unable to reconcile the demands of bickering political parties, Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro on Monday asked the country’s top banker to head a transition government to adopt electoral reform and schedule new elections.

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, 72, the prestigious head of the Bank of Italy, accepted the offer to quickly form a government, avoiding any vacuum of power. The new Cabinet is expected to be made up principally of nonpolitical technicians like himself.

“My commitment is to form a government capable of interpreting the nation’s unmistakable call for change,” Ciampi said.

In an unprecedented gesture of independence responding to a national demand for overhaul of a discredited political system, Ciampi said he will appoint his Cabinet today without prior consultation with Italy’s political parties.

Ciampi’s decision to invoke a constitutional provision allowing a prime minister to name ministers directly means that he will have no formal party support and therefore no nominal majority in Parliament.

His political footing may therefore be shaky, but Ciampi won quick support in the marketplace Monday. The stock market rose in Milan, and the lira firmed against foreign currencies.

In naming Ciampi to head Italy’s 52nd postwar government, Scalfaro sought a figure who could rule stably and with economic authority until national elections are held under new electoral rules--perhaps in the fall.

The choice of Ciampi, who has worked for Italy’s central bank since 1946 and has been its president since 1979, was a clear signal that Italy will pursue the economic rationalization policies of the departing government of Prime Minister Giuliano Amato.

Decimated by scandal, the 10-month Amato government nevertheless took important steps to reduce Italy’s alarming budget deficit and to sell off pieces of its huge state-run industries.

“The absolute priority is electoral reform,” Ciampi said, promising also a government that will enact reforms overwhelmingly demanded by exasperated voters in a referendum April 18-19.

“At the same time, the government must address public spending, a deficit reduction and a more equitable fiscal policy. Production must be geared to employment,” Ciampi said, endorsing policies Amato had begun on his advice.

Ciampi also pledged to continue the hard-line, anti-Mafia policies that were one of the signal successes of Amato’s rule and to support continuing corruption investigations.

Long a champion of the separation between political power and monetary authority in Italy, Ciampi may, under Italian law, retain his bank job while also serving as prime minister. The governor of Italy’s central bank, the equivalent of the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States, serves for life.

In political circles, Ciampi’s appointment won support from the dominant Christian Democrats and their Socialist allies.

The left was less persuaded; the Marxist Refounded Communist Party accused Ciampi of a “disastrous” economic policy. Italy last autumn was forced into a devaluation and a humiliating departure from the European Monetary System.

“Ciampi is a man of great competence and value. He’d do any job well,” said Fiat Chairman Giovanni Agnelli as Ciampi’s appointment was being bruited.

One Italian commentator said the reserved, professorial Ciampi “knows politics but is not a man of politics.”

The choice of Ciampi, with his above-it-all reputation, is aimed at restoring confidence in Italian political institutions that has been shaken to the point of voters’ revolt by revelations of gigantic corruption and abuse of public office.

Since early last year, magistrates in Milan, subsequently joined by their counterparts in virtually all major cities, have documented systemic corruption in which political parties exacted billions of dollars’ worth of bribes and kickbacks from businesses in return for awarding public works contract.

With more than 2,600 business leaders and politicians implicated in investigations that are still gaining momentum, Italians voted overwhelmingly for change in a referendum that targeted arrogant political parties that have divided the spoils of power since World War II.

Their chief reform demand is for direct, winners-take-all election of three-quarters of the members of the Senate, scrapping a system of proportional representation that is seen as the source of a succession of weak coalition governments under which corruption thrived.

Voters who abolished three ministries and ended state financial support for political parties now expect Parliament to extend electoral reform to the 630-seat lower house before the next national elections are held under the new system.

Ciampi may have no formal backing in Parliament, but he can count on public opinion, which in reform-hungry Italy is already exerting greater pressure than at any time since the war.