Silvio Berlusconi’s re-election bid was thrown into fresh doubt yesterday as his support among party stalwarts and a right-wing splinter group eroded ahead of a campaign for February elections in Italy.
Just over a week after the three-time Prime Minister announced his candidacy, his People of Freedom (PDL) party’s national secretary Angelino Alfano told a convention in Rome that a run by outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti would avoid “handing the country back to the left and dragging Italy backwards”.
Roberto Formigoni, governor of the wealthy northern Lombardy region, said: “Today we are all for Monti to be candidate for Prime Minister.”
Former Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said: “Mario Monti and the Monti agenda have interpreted well the idea of the common good.”
“I hope they will continue interpreting it in the next parliament not because other European countries want this but because Italians need it.”
The 76-year-old Berlusconi has himself sown confusion by saying he is willing to drop his candidacy if Monti runs, adding to domestic and international pressure on the technocrat prime minister to spell out his intentions.
Berlusconi reiterated his offer yesterday, saying in a note to his supporters that Monti “shares my, your and our ideals” and calling for an end to “sterile disputes” within his own party.
Recent polls have shown that what would be Berlusconi’s sixth election campaign in two decades would end in a crushing defeat at the hands of a resurgent centre-left, and political observers have said he may be looking for a way out.
The current favourite is centre-left Democratic Party leader Pier Luigi Bersani, a cigar-chomping ex-communist who has promised to follow Monti’s reforms but also do more for “jobs and equity”.
Berlusconi was forced out in November 2011 following a parliamentary revolt from within his own party, as well as a wave of panic on the financial markets and a surge of sex scandals. Monti, a former top European commissioner and a respected economics professor, was voted in by Parliament as Berlusconi’s replacement at the head of an unelected, technocratic government charged with saving Italy from the brink of bankruptcy.