Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has unveiled the alliance he will lead into February’s parliamentary election and said he was unlikely to agree to serve as a minister in another premier’s cabinet after the vote.
I am unlikely to accept a job in someone else’s Cabinet
The 69-year-old former European Commissioner, who replaced Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister in November 2011 when Italy was scrambling to avert a financial crisis, announced last week that he would run for a second term.
Monti said the grouping would be called ‘With Monti for Italy’, whose logo is a circular symbol with the colours of the Italian flag and his surname in the centre.
“I hope that (the new alliance) helps improve politics, and that it renews the interest of those Italians who had turned their back on politics, involving them actively again in public affairs,” Monti said. Opinion surveys have shown that up to 50 per cent of the electorate plan to abstain or are undecided in the February 24-25 election that is a three-way battle between rightist Berlusconi, Monti and centre-left frontrunner Pier Luigi Bersani.
Focusing the campaign strongly around Monti could be a risky tactic, with his popularity dented by the tough tax hikes and spending cuts he has introduced over the past 13 months. Roughly 60 per cent of Italians are against the idea of him standing for a second term, polls show.
A poll by the Tecne research institute released on SkyTG24 on Friday showed that Monti’s grouping would likely attract slightly more than 12 per cent of the vote.
That compares with 40 per cent for his rivals on the left, Bersani’s Democratic Party (PD) and its coalition ally Left, Ecology, Freedom; and 25 per cent for the most likely centre-right coalition of Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PDL) and the Northern League, the poll showed.
Monti, who wants to form a broad coalition of pro-Europe, pro-reform parties after the election, said his goal was to continue as Prime Minister, and he was unlikely to accept a job in someone else’s Cabinet.
When asked if he would consider being, for example, the economy minister under another prime minister, he told La 7 television channel: “I believe not.”
“I do not think I would have the motivation to commit myself to serve a government that did not agree with me on at least 98 per cent of policy,” he said.
He told La 7 he would be open to a three-way television debate with Berlusconi and Bersani.
Monti plans to lead a single alliance in the upper house, while three separate blocs would run as a coalition with the economics professor as their leader in the lower house.
One will be a list of candidates who have not before participated in politics, to be called ‘A Civic Choice: With Monti for Italy’.
The other two will be already existing centrist parties, the Catholic UDC led by Pier Ferdinando Casini, and FLI led by Chamber of Deputies President Gianfranco Fini.
The different groupings in the two houses would maximise the alliance’s political power while preserving the separate identities of the centrist parties that are backing Monti.