Berlusconi Wins Confidence Vote From Senate : Italy: Despite misgivings about neo-fascists in his Cabinet, the upper chamber hands him a key victory.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi narrowly won parliamentary approval Wednesday to launch a novel, untried right-wing government, despite widespread misgivings about the inclusion of neo-fascist ministers in his Cabinet.

After two days and 16 hours of often acerbic debate, the Senate gave the 57-year-old Milan media mogul a vote of confidence Wednesday night. Berlusconi triumphed 159-153, picking up crucial last-minute votes to forge a majority.

It was a day of charged emotions, high tension and offstage thunder. As a violent storm lashed the city, lightning struck Parliament not long before the Senate convened. Once mounting votes signaled his victory, Berlusconi sneaked out of the Senate chamber for a few minutes to join most other Italians in watching television as his soccer team, Milan, won a big game, 4-0, against Barcelona in Athens.

The legislative victory means that, only a few months after turning from business to politics, Berlusconi can now put into motion Italy’s 53rd postwar government. It is the first to vigorously espouse private enterprise and free-market economics, and the first to include participation by heirs of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Addressing senators Wednesday, Berlusconi promised a vigorous legislative initiative to revitalize the Italian economy with tax relief, streamlined public administration and control of the public deficit. He reiterated his campaign promise to create 1 million jobs.

Italy’s relations with its West European partners and the United States loom large in the early stages of a Berlusconi administration that could last four years without a new election if he retains parliamentary support.

On June 2, President Clinton comes to Rome for ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of World War II landings. In July, Clinton and leaders of the other Group of Seven industrialized nations return to Italy for a summit Berlusconi will host in Naples.

Berlusconi told senators Wednesday that the coalition he had assembled was the only option for government. Failure to win parliamentary approval would mean new elections, he said.

“The majority of Italians have established with their vote that . . . this coalition has the honor and burden of government,” he told a Senate in which most of the 315 members, like himself, are political rookies.

A self-made billionaire, Berlusconi jumped into politics earlier this year to head off what seemed at the time like certain victory in March elections by Italy’s former Communists. Scandal had destroyed parties that dominated all 52 postwar governments, fueling a historic voter revolt.

Campaigning on a strongly anti-Communist platform with the unabashed backing of his three national television channels, Berlusconi assembled an electoral alliance with the federalist Northern League under Umberto Bossi and the National Alliance, a neo-fascist movement headed by Gianfranco Fini.

After the election, renegade Christian Democrats joined the coalition, which has a clear majority in the Chamber of Deputies, making a confidence vote there a formality.

Debate in the lower house begins today and will parallel Senate discussion that underlined broad distrust with Berlusconi’s neo-fascist allies.

A demonstration by 200 young Nazis in the northern town of Vicenza on Sunday received big headlines. Italy’s partners in the European Union are outspokenly concerned, although the United States has expressed no alarm.

Berlusconi says he will have no truck with fascism. For his part, Fini is quick to distance himself from youthful extremists whose small but virulent demonstrations have brought controversy and dispute to a party he is seeking to pull away from the extreme right.

Senate debate Wednesday mirrored the alarm many Italians feel at any possible return of the kind of authoritarian regime that made the trains run on time from 1922 to 1945 at great cost to personal and national freedom.

“We are facing not a renewal, but a return of fascists who are still heirs of a dictatorship that brought the country to war. . . . They are trying to show they are different but can’t succeed however hard they try,” Sen. Antonino Cuffaro charged Wednesday in announcing that Communist Refoundation, an assertively Marxist party, would join former Communists and centrists in voting against Berlusconi.

Fini, 42, a polished and well-spoken political veteran, says his movement is “post-fascist” and has proved its democratic credentials over the past four decades. Fini studiously avoids any contact with extreme right-wing movements elsewhere in Europe, and by comparison, his rhetoric and policies are moderate. But he has also said that he considers Mussolini the century’s greatest statesman.

“It is impossible for me to vote for a government in which there are ministers who have not repudiated fascism,” said Leo Valiani, an 85-year-old resistance hero who is one of Italy’s nine life senators. He spent six years in a Mussolini jail.

Five ministers of Berlusconi’s Cabinet are members of the National Alliance that Fini forged to participate in the March election; three of those five are also members of the Italian Social Movement.

The MSI, as the party is known, was founded in 1946 as the lineal descendant of Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

After World War II, the constitution of the Italian republic banned the Fascist Party, forcing Mussolini’s heirs to find a new name.

In every legislature since 1972, as a matter of principle, the MSI has automatically submitted an outsider’s wish list of laws: One would rescind the constitutional prohibition against the formation of a Fascist Party by that name, another would lift a ban on the return to Italy of any member of the country’s royal family.

With neo-fascists in government for the first time, the two proposals were supposed to have been held back this year, but were mistakenly filed April 26, MSI officials said.

An embarrassed Fini ordered them withdrawn.