Monti to govern in Italy

ROME — A day after accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s president on Sunday asked Mario Monti, a former European commissioner, to form a government tasked with helping defend Italy from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.

President Giorgio Napolitano formally tapped Monti on Sunday evening after a day of meetings with political leaders across the spectrum, almost all of whom had pledged their support for a government of technocrats to guide Italy into its post-Berlusconi future.

“The president of the republic ... has received Sen. Mario Monti and conferred a mandate to form a government,” said a statement from the presidential palace.

Monti told reporters in Rome that he would get to work quickly to try to form a new government. Italy must “heal its finances” and resume growth because the country’s leaders owe it to future generations, he said.

“There is an emergency, but we can overcome it with a common effort,” the 68-year-old economics professor said.

“In a moment of particular difficulty, Italy must win the challenge to bounce back; we must be an element of strength and not weakness in the European Union, of which we are founders,” he added.

The leader of Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party said Sunday that the party would support a Monti government only for as long as it could fulfill its mandate to push through measures to help reduce Italy’s $2.6 trillion public debt and increase growth to keep the country competitive.

Berlusconi’s party also demanded that only technocrats — not politicians — make up Monti’s Cabinet in exchange for its crucial support.

The party had been pushing for early elections, while media reports said Monti hopes to serve until the end of the current legislature in 2013.

Berlusconi’s main ally in his 17 years of politics, Umberto Bossi, said his Northern League, a regional party with its power base in the affluent north, would stay in the opposition and insisted early elections are the true solution.

“We won’t give him any blank check,” Bossi said of Monti.

Berlusconi addressed the nation in a video message Sunday evening, declaring his “love and passion” for Italy and his bitterness at having been jeered Saturday after he tendered his resignation, an act he said had been one of “generosity” toward the country.

European leaders had come to see Berlusconi as a liability to Italy and the euro currency as Italy’s borrowing rates soared last week to levels that have forced other eurozone countries to seek bailouts.

As the third-largest economy in the eurozone, Italy is considered too big for bailouts like those in Greece, Portugal and Ireland. The government needs to push through more austerity measures to deal with $2.6 trillion in debt — about 120 percent of the country’s economic output.

Months of political deadlock broke last week when Berlusconi lost his majority in a technical vote in the lower house. The 75-year-old media mogul resigned Saturday after Parliament approved new austerity measures demanded by the European Union and central bank officials.

Monti was expected to present a Cabinet of nonpoliticians and introduce his program today before Parliament, where a majority must vote confidence in his government.

“If someone tries to set up a government in two hours, it ends up taking a lot longer,” Napolitano said in a nationally televised address Sunday. “How long this will take was never discussed. Monti will proceed as fast as he can while listening, evaluating and deciding whether to come here” and present his Cabinet list, the president said.

In his video address, Berlusconi said the crisis had hit the euro, not just Italy, and he called on the European Central Bank to do more to help save the euro.

In a letter to a rightist leader published on the Italian news agency ANSA on Sunday, Berlusconi blamed the loss of his control of the Parliament on a breakaway group led by a former ally who split from his People of Liberty party in 2010.

The group, Berlusconi said, was driven by “the logic of petty blackmail” and “trasformismo,” a storied Italian tradition in which politicians change their positions to suit the demands of the moment, which he called “the oldest vice of Italian politics,” ANSA reported.

Such “trasformismo” was a guiding principle of the revolving-door governments of Italy’s postwar period and into the 1990s, after the collapse of the old political order in a bribery scandal and with the end of the Cold War.

It was eclipsed in the Berlusconi years, aided by a 2005 electoral law that helped create the semblance of a twoparty system. The Berlusconi government in recent years has been overshadowed by sex scandals and charges of corruption, with the former prime minister currently facing three criminal trials.

Some young Italians, who increasingly have said they feel the labor market protects older workers, took Berlusconi’s departure as a good sign.

“We’ve been following what happened since the summer with growing concern. The government’s complete immobility, deafness and incapability to understand reality and act accordingly was very scary,” said Laura Calderoni, 36, an architect in Rome.

Others said Italy’s problems did not begin with Berlusconi and would not end with Monti.

“I just think that Berlusconi is not the root of all our economic evil,” said Anna Costeri, 43, a dental hygienist from Sardinia who was visiting Rome.

“I am not that hopeful that someone so close to rating agencies and the banks can do our best interest,” she added of Monti.

Information for this article was contributed by Rachel Donadio of The New York Times; by Francis D’Emilio and Gabriele Steinhauser of The Associated Press; and by Andrew Davis, Chiara Remondini and Lorenzo Totaro of Bloomberg News.