Prodi re-confirmed PM

Italian centre-left leader Romano Prodi was re-confirmed as Prime Minister yesterday when he won a second and final confidence vote in Parliament, ending a political crisis and ensuring there will be no snap election.

He won by 342 votes to 198 with two abstentions in the lower house, a much wider margin than in Wednesday's vote in the Senate, where he remains vulnerable to further defections by allies like one that forced him to resign temporarily last week.

Prof. Prodi stepped down after splits in his centre-left coalition lost him a foreign policy vote. He was then instructed by President Giorgio Napolitano to test his majority in Parliament to see if he had the support to return to power.

"It was a good vote," Prof. Prodi told reporters. "A great margin, but also the debate showed the centre left is much more united than the centre right and that means the government's work will go ahead strongly."

But his fragile grip on power will be tested again in the coming weeks when the Senate, where he has only a wafer-thin majority, votes on financing Italy's military presence in Afghanistan, a mission opposed by some leftist senators.

Prof. Prodi declined to comment. It is unlikely he could survive a humiliating defeat on such a vital foreign policy issue.

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon who narrowly lost last year's general election, has forecast that Prof. Prodi will not last much longer in power.

A poll this week showed 40 per cent of Italians agreed, predicting his government would last just a few more months.

"You're so ridiculously proud of your self-declared majority, but you don't have enough votes to approve the Afghanistan decree," Mr Berlusconi said in parliament.

But Prof. Prodi, buoyed by recent economic data, was on combative form and said his government now had a mandate to push ahead with sometimes unpopular economic policies aimed at increasing competition and making life easier for would-be entrepreneurs.