Prodi seeks trust

Former justice minister undermines Italian government

Tonight the fate of Romano Prodi's government is being decided in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament. The Prime Minister himself raised the issue of a vote of confidence yesterday. The crisis erupted on Monday when former Justice Minister Clemente Mastella announced his supporters in the lower house and senate were leaving the ruling center-left Union coalition and were ready to vote against the government.

Prodi is confident of his victory. After all, even with the departure of 14 deputies from Mastello’s Union of Democrats for Europe (UDE) party to the opposition, the power coalition will remain at least 327 deputies in the 640-seat lower house. Things were worse in the 315-seat Senate, where the prime minister had an advantage of just one vote, which Mastella seemed to lure away. The date of the vote has not yet been announced, but if Prodi loses this battle, his cabinet will have to leave, since both houses of parliament have the same rights.

A harbinger of the crisis was Mastella’s resignation as head of the Ministry of Justice on January 16. The politician announced it immediately after the arrest of most of the leaders of the SDE in the southern region of Campania on charges of corruption and the placement under house arrest for extortion of his wife Sandra Lonardo, the deputy head of the SDE and the chairman of the legislative council of Campania. “Between the love of my family and power, I choose the former,” Mastella said at the time, suggesting that the law enforcement crackdown was a response to his plans for democratic reforms in the judiciary.

Yesterday Mastella supported the leader of the opposition center-right bloc “People of Freedom”, ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who lost to Prodi in the parliamentary elections in April 2006. Berlusconi demanded the “immediate and without unnecessary formalities” resignation of the government and the speedy holding of new general elections. Mastella was Labor Minister in Berlusconi's cabinet in 1994. Both of them appeared ten years later in cases of financial fraud in the football clubs they controlled: Berlusconi in Milan, Mastella in Naples Napoli.

In addition, Mastella, while mayor of his hometown of Ceppaloni in Campania (this post is still his), became such close friends with one of the former leaders of the Sicilian mafia, Francesco Campanella, that in 2000 he was a witness at his wedding. In Italy they say that shady affairs connected Mastella with Prodi. In the fall of 2007, the prosecutor's office of the city of Catanzara in southern Calabria said that it had every reason to suspect politicians of “exceeding official authority” and “criminal conspiracy” to illegally redistribute EU funds.

Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN