THE HONEYMOON period for newly installed Italian prime minister Mario Monti continued yesterday on a day when he not only won his second parliamentary confidence vote in two days but also received the encouragement of Pope Benedict XVI.
As expected, Mr Monti’s emergency government of technocrats and academics registered an emphatic success in the Lower House, winning by an overwhelming 551 to 56 votes.
As in the Senate on Thursday, the Northern League was again the only major party to vote against the government which was sworn in on Wednesday night, just eight days after Mr Monti’s predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, had announced his resignation.
Earlier in the day, Mr Monti had travelled out to Rome’s Fiumicino airport to wish the pope “buono viaggio” as the pontiff set out on a pastoral visit to Benin. Speaking to reporters on the papal plane, Holy See spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said that the pope had “much appreciated” the prime minister’s gesture, adding that Benedict had offered his best wishes to Mr Monti.
Italian media commentators have made much of the fact that three of the 18 cabinet ministers named by Mr Monti, namely arts minister Lorenzo Ornaghi, development minister Corrado Passero and international co-operation minister Andrea Riccardi, all participated last month in an important meeting of Catholic movers and shakers in the Umbrian town of Todi.
The alacrity with which both the Holy See, in the person of secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and the Italian Bishops Conference, via its daily L'Avvenire,have greeted the formation of the Monti government this week further suggests a very definite church seal of approval.
In his speech to parliament, Mr Monti said that the task facing his government, as he attempted to correct the Italian economy, was “almost impossible”, adding however that “we will nonetheless succeed”.
Acknowledging that in the immediate short term, his government would be taking difficult, “unpleasant” decisions, Mr Monti called on Italians to admit their own responsibility for the current crisis, rather than merely blaming other factors such the “serious malfunctioning of the markets and the financial institutions”.
As on Thursday in the Senate, Mr Monti said his government was one of “national commitment” which he hoped would survive through to the end of the current legislature, in the spring of 2013.
Referring to speculation that the bigger parties, in particular Mr Berlusconi’s PDL, might “pull the plug” before then, Mr Monti joked that, as electrical appliances go, it would be hard to say if his government was “more a razor than an artificial lung”.
Mr Monti also said that he would be in Brussels and Strasbourg next week for meetings with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and European Council president Herman Van Rompuy.
Earlier in the day, Ireland had registered its own modest footnote in this Italian government crisis when Minister of State for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton took part in the new government’s first official meeting with another EU member state when meeting newly appointed counterpart, Enzo Moavero Milanesi.