ROME: Italy’s new prime minister threatened yesterday to resign if a plan to reduce the powers of the upper house of parliament, a central part of his ambitious constitutional reform agenda, is blocked.
In the latest step of Matteo Renzi’s reform drive, the cabinet is due to approve a draft bill yesterday to transform the Senate into a non-elected chamber stripped of the power to approve budgets or hold votes of no-confidence in a government.
Renzi, who became Italy’s third prime minister in a year in February, has said that without a change in the system, the country risks being stuck with a rotating series of short-lived governments incapable of passing meaningful reforms.
“I have put all my credibility into this reform; if it doesn’t succeed, I can only assume the consequences,” Renzi, Italy’s youngest prime minister at 39, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Renzi, head of the centre-left Democratic Party, made a similar threat to quit over Senate reform on March 12 while pushing through a package of tax cuts aimed at reviving Italy’s sluggish economy, the third largest in the euro zone.
The former mayor of Florence came to power after a party coup, taking over the unwieldy cross-party coalition formed after last year’s deadlocked election. His bill would scrap the current fragmented system, which grants equal powers to the Senate and the lower house Chamber of Deputies but elects them by different rules which make it hard for any group to win a stable overall majority in parliament.
Reuters
