Italy’s Right Wins Top Parliament Posts : Europe: Three-party alliance headed by Berlusconi now looks to getting the premiership, probably by midweek.

Three months after making his political debut, billionaire Silvio Berlusconi took a decisive stride toward the prime minister’s office Saturday when supporters of his right-wing alliance won leadership of both houses of Parliament. He could be named the head of Italy’s next government by midweek.

Berlusconi called Saturday’s election of new presidents for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies a test of his ability to govern.

He passed--by a whisker. The restive three-party alliance that Berlusconi led to a stunning victory in elections last month easily won in the Chamber of Deputies but only captured the Senate by a single vote.

Jubilant supporters of Berlusconi’s free-market party and its federalist and neo-fascist allies hailed the victories as the first step on the road to what they call a Second Republic, a modern state that overcomes the inefficiency and corruption of its predecessor.

In a government-changing ballet performed 52 times in Italy since World War II, the installation of parliamentary officers allowed technocrat Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to submit his resignation, which he did Saturday. Ciampi will remain in office as a caretaker while President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro begins a round of consultations to determine a successor.

Berlusconi, as leader of the largest party in the new Parliament, is the inescapable choice. Most observers think Scalfaro will ask him to form a government Wednesday or Thursday.

The 59-year-old Milan media and real estate tycoon--who also owns supermarkets, Italy’s largest advertising agency and the country’s best soccer team--is raring to go.

Himself one of 452 rookie legislators in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies, Berlusconi threatened new elections if his candidate did not win in the Senate. And he writhed at the measured pace of legislative life as the Parliament convened for the first time Friday.

“Will I always be forced to live this kind of life?” he asked reporters playfully. “I never have done so little in my life.”

Berlusconi’s free-market Forza Italia (Go, Italy) and its allies are a few votes short of an outright majority among the 315 elected senators and 11 nominated-for-life senators.

In the Senate, Forza Italia candidate Carlo Scognamiglio, 50, a white-bearded economist-executive who is now a university rector, ran into fierce opposition from supporters of outgoing Senate President Giovanni Spadolini, a former prime minister and leader of the tiny Republican Party. For decades, Scognamiglio was the bespectacled and rotund symbol of the political Establishment.

Backed by centrists and leftists still smarting from their electoral drubbing by Berlusconi, Spadolini held off the right-wing candidate in two votes Friday. A third round Saturday ended in a tie.

Scognamiglio won the fourth ballot, 162-161. Then he braced the chamber with a let’s-work-together maiden speech written on a single page of notes and delivered in an informal, professorial style so markedly different from Spadolini-era rhetoric and formality that it captured both the changed face and the changed nature of the new legislature.

In the Chamber of Deputies, Berlusconi’s backers hold an absolute majority, and the victory of the right’s candidate was never in question, although she proved more controversial than some of her backers might have liked.

Irene Pivetti, a 31-year-old Catholic fundamentalist member of the Northern League, received 346 votes to win the powerful post that is the Italian equivalent of Speaker of the House in the United States.

“Your soul to God, your vote to Bossi,” was her campaign slogan, referring to Northern League leader Umberto Bossi. Pivetti’s Catholicism is so pervasive that she has drawn accusations of anti-Semitism. She dismisses them as “foolishness.”

Saturday’s parliamentary votes represented the first test of unity for members of three alliance parties wed more by a thirst for power than common goals. Bossi distrusts Berlusconi and dislikes alliance partner Gianfranco Fini and the new respectability of neo-fascism.