Asian Tribune: Prodi government takes power in Italy: a right-wing regime with a left fig leaf - by Peter Schwarz

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Prodi government takes power in Italy: a right-wing regime with a left fig leaf - by Peter Schwarz

Five and a half weeks after parliamentary elections, a new Italian government was sworn into office Wednesday.

The governing coalition stretches from moderate Christian Democrats to liberals, Greens, social democrats, the Democratic Left (the successor organization to Italy’s Communist Party), and Communism Refounded (Rifondazione Comunista). In order to satisfy all eight governing parties the head of the government, Romano Prodi, distributed a total of 25 ministerial posts, one more than the cabinet of his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi. When deputy minister and state secretaries are added, the total of government ministers exceeds well over one hundred. The majority of cabinet posts go to the Democratic Left—which received nine—and the bourgeois Margherita with seven posts. The smaller parties have to make do with just one post each. Despite the broad spectrum of parties in the cabinet, the key ministries are securely in the hands of persons close to Prodi who are committed to pursuing a right-wing, pro-business and pro-European Union policy. While less significant ministries were divided up to create enough posts for the various parties, the Finance and Economic Ministries are in the hands of one man—66-year-old Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. Like Prodi he belongs to no particular party and enjoys the confidence of the international financial markets.

Padoa-Schioppa, who has a diploma from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, has spent virtually his entire professional career in the executive levels of major banks. At the age of 28, he joined the Bank of Italy. Eleven years later in 1979 he switched to become the general director for Economic and Financial Affairs in the EU Commission. Four years on he returned to the Bank of Italy. In 1997 he took over the supervision of the Italian Stock Exchange for a year. He then spent the last seven years as an executive of the European Central Bank.