Italy’s politics. A dog’s dinner for Romano Prodi

Gloomy conclusions from arguments over the choices for speaker of each of the two houses of parliament

THE first big test of Romano Prodi's ability to govern Italy might be risible were it not so sad. This weekend, a newly elected Senate is setting about choosing Italy's second-ranking official. The speaker of the upper house is also the country's vice-president: he steps in if the head of state cannot perform his duties. The speaker has "hard power", filtering legislation through a chamber that, unusually, has the same clout as the lower house. But he also wields "soft power", as a respected establishment figure with a right to pronounce on the issues of the day.

This time round, the choice of Senate speaker is doubly important. Since the election on April 9th and 10th, it has become clear that the upper house is where the problems facing Mr Prodi and his would-be centre-left government will be most acute. In the election, Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government actually won more votes for the Senate, but the new electoral rules that, ironically, Mr Berlusconi devised to hurt the centre-left yielded Mr Prodi a wafer-thin majority.

If the centre-left proves unable to get its choice as speaker, it will surely also be unable to govern effectively. Indeed, a failure may reopen the question of its forming a new government at all, and perhaps signal a fresh election instead. The centre-left's inoffensive candidate is a former Christian Democrat trade unionist, Franco Marini. But he faces a formidable challenge from the centre-right's candidate: Giulio Andreotti, an 87-year-old life senator who was prime minister seven times between 1972 and 1992.

The re-emergence of Mr Andreotti beggars belief. Even leaving aside his age, it is hard to think of anybody who better embodies the sleazy, conspiratorial power-broking that characterised Italian politics until the early 1990s. Two years ago, Italy's highest appeals court upheld a lower-court verdict that, until 1980, Mr Andreotti was in "concrete collaboration" with Sicily's Mafia. He escaped criminal conviction only because too much time had elapsed since the offence.

Yet in another sense it is appropriate that this wizened, hunched figure should again be central to Italian public life. For Mr Berlusconi's calamitous decision to reintroduce proportional representation may now revive the political horse-trading from which Italians hoped they had escaped in the early 1990s--of which Mr Andreotti was an absolute master.

The arithmetic is that Mr Prodi's coalition won 158 of the 315 elected seats in the Senate; Mr Berlusconi's side took 156. The last elected seat went to an independent, giving the centre-left a notional majority of one. But there are also seven life senators, most of whom, unlike Mr Andreotti, lean to the left. And Italy's parliamentary politics are fluid. Elected representatives do not always stay with the coalition for which they ran and, even when they do, they do not always vote for it. Already, one senator on Mr Prodi's ticket has said that he will vote for the next speaker "according to conscience".

In a foretaste of what awaits him, Mr Prodi this week devoted precious hours to securing the support of the Sudtiroler Volkspartei, which represents German-speakers in northern Italy. He also spent time wooing the independent senator, an 80-year-old from Argentina who has not lived in Italy since 1952. He is one of six senators chosen by Italian expatriates.

The thinking behind the centre-right's decision to back Mr Andreotti was that some former Christian Democrats belonging to the centre-left might vote for their erstwhile leader out of respect. Mr Andreotti, who has presented himself as the man to reconcile a divided nation, is not the discredited figure in Italy that he is abroad. Quite the reverse. When the ruling on his appeal was announced in 2004, Italy's media and politicians focused on the decision to acquit him on charges of association with the Mafia after 1980.

The outcome of the race for Senate speaker will help to answer one of the two big questions raised by the election: how long a government formed by Mr Prodi might survive. It is the likely choice of speaker for the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, that hints at the answer to the other question: whether Mr Prodi will be able to force through the radical economic reforms Italy needs.

In the 630-seat chamber, the centre-left enjoys a healthy majority of at least 66--thanks, once again, to Mr Berlusconi's new electoral system, which gives a bonus to the winning side. But Mr Prodi's coalition depends on the support of two communist parties whose leaders can be expected to balk at almost any reforms proposed by a new finance minister, especially hints at more labour-market reform or further privatisations. Both these parties made big gains at the election, giving them powerful leverage over a centre-left government.

The stronger of the two is the Refounded Communists, a party set up as an alternative for those who did not want to join their former comrades in ditching Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The party now has 41 seats in the lower house and 27 in the Senate. Events since polling day have left no doubt that its leader, Fausto Bertinotti, intends to make this tally count to the full.

It was expected at first that the speakership of the Chamber of Deputies would go to the Democrats of the Left, the biggest party in Mr Prodi's alliance, created by those who did decide to give up Marxism in the early 1990s. Massimo D'Alema, an experienced parliamentarian who was prime minister from 1998 to 2000, was the obvious choice. But Mr Bertinotti decided that he wanted the job and, in the first serious clash within the centre-left since the election, Mr D'Alema, encouraged by Mr Prodi, withdrew his candidacy.

This episode illustrates not only the power of Mr Bertinotti, but also the pernicious effects of full proportional representation. It has weakened the big parties that underpin coalition governments, and strengthened smaller ones that are only too ready to bring governments down. Once more, this is disturbingly reminiscent of the world before 1994, when parties with even less popular support than the Refounded Communists exerted huge influence by constant threats of defection.

In short, at a time when it ought to be marching bravely into the future, Italy seems to be slipping inexorably back into the past. And that is an even more serious concern than Mr Berlusconi's continuing refusal to accept his election defeat.