Word: spadolini
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...their vacations last week to glance at a newspaper were not quite prepared for the official photograph of their new government. Man for man and portfolio for portfolio, it consisted of the same 28 ministers who had posed for the ritual picture in June 1981. True, Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini appeared to have put on a few pounds, and Treasury Minister Benjamino Andreatta had shifted from the far left to the far right. Otherwise, as Italians quickly noted, it was a "photocopy government...
...then had Italy's politicians subjected the country to a 17-day political crisis? The explanation was typically Florentine. Four weeks ago, Spadolini's five-party centrist coalition tried to push through parliament part of a new austerity program designed to boost industrial production, reduce the balance of payments deficit and curb inflation. A renegade group of Christian Democrats broke party discipline and rejected a government proposal aimed at squeezing more tax revenues from the oil industry. Charging that the country was "ungovernable," Socialist Leader Bettino Craxi withdrew his party's seven ministers from the Cabinet. Given...
...become almost a tradition in Western Europe, the bad news was presented to the public at the height of the summer vacation season in order to lessen the immediate outcry of national pain. With millions of his countrymen at the beaches and in the mountains, Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini proclaimed a stringent austerity package, describing the proposals as being of "historic proportions." They were indeed, but they also contained political dynamite with an unexpectedly short fuse. Only five days after the big economic squeeze was announced, seven Socialist ministers resigned from Spadolini's 28-member Cabinet last week...
...first time that the snipers had sabotaged legislation by the Spadolini coalition, but in the past, the defeated measures usually were soon rewritten and passed on a vote of confidence. This time Craxi seemed to be deliberately seeking to force new elections some time in the autumn in the hope of increasing the Socialists' 10% share of the national vote. Encouraged by healthy Socialist gains in recent local elections, Craxi has made no secret of his ambition to become Italy's first postwar Socialist Prime Minister...
...stunned as everyone else by an August crisis, Spadolini at week's end called a final, two-hour meeting of his Cabinet, which formally dissolved the government. He then visited President Sandro Pertini, 85, to announce the decision. Pertini is expected to confer this week with political leaders of all parties before offering the mandate to form a new government