Senator Mastella, the head of a tiny Catholic party which polls a mere 1.5% of the vote, is an extremely wily politician who has repeatedly succeeded in using the leverage even a small party can have in a fragile political system to guarantee himself, and his party, a role that is far greater than it should be. A former Christian Democrat, he has always moved easily from right of center to left of center and now, apparently wants to move back into the Berlusconi fold. Immediately following his resignation, he had announced his party's three Senate votes would continue to go to shoring up the Prodi Cabinet, but subsequently, claiming he did not feel he had received enough support from his allies, he changed his mind and brought the government down. An attempt to form an interim government headed by the Speaker of the Senate, Franco Marini, failed and President Giorgio Napolitano was forced to dissolve parliament and call  elections for April.

      There is no doubt that even before the government collapsed, many ordinary Italians were dissatisfied with the Prodi government's performance. And understandably so. The eight parties in his coalition - all too small to stand on their own feet -  disagreed sharply on many important issues of domestic and foreign policy.  And the constant bickering repeatedly was to bring them to the edge. As the newspaper Il Giornale pointed out the other day, in the year and a half that Prodi was in power, the government passed only 61 laws, and many of them were relatively unimportant laws such as the establishment of a Non-seeing Person's Day and minor financial subsidies for co-production films with the Turkish government. The lively paper, which is hardly impartial as it is owned by the Berlusconi family, also pointed out that the number of laws represented only half of those passed in the same time period by the previous Prodi government and only one third of the number passed by the last Berluscnoi government in its first 20 months in power. (The paper thus claimed that, given the operating costs of the two houses of parliament, each law cost taxpayers 47 million euros).

      But the major problem at present, along with the lack of charismatic leaders with a clear vision for this troubled country, is that the current electoral system gives excessive representation to Italy's smallest parties. The system has been altered and fine-tuned repeatedly over the last 15 years but the latest version uses a complex region by-region tally for the Senate that makes forming a majority difficult if not impossible. Only a few weeks ago, an Italian high court validated the signatures presented by reformers calling for a popular referendum on the electoral law that, had parliament not been dissolved, should have been held this spring. Most political scientists here believe Italy desperately needs to adopt a system which, like those in other European countries, bars parties with less than five percent of the vote from sitting in parliament. But since this would affect something like ten of Italy's 16 parties, forcing them either to go out of business or to merge with other groups, most politicians are opposed.

      Following its defeat in World War Two, Italy went through decades of instability with governments often lasting less than a year. Then , too, one problem was that its overly "pure" system of proportional representation (supporters said, instead, it was truly democratic). The major postwar party, the Christian Democrats, originally dominated the political scene and was mostly at the mercy of the rivalries among the party's different factions. As poor government caused that party to gradually lose ground, it became progressively more dependent on a series of small, fractious partners with government crises arriving at the average rate of one a year.

      In 1992 the Christian Democrats and their Socialist partners were decimated by the sweeping Clean Hands scandal and changes were made to the electoral method, bringing into existence a structure based in part on single member, winner takes all, constituencies, in the hopes of making the system more bipolar. This led to the emergence of two principal coalitions, Berlusconi's Freedom coalition (now called the People of Freedom) of four or five parties and the left-of -center Olive Tree, which somewhere along the line changed it's name to the Union. But it has not made the country more stable or better-governed because often the parties do not even agree on basics. And unfortunately for those who cannot stomach Berlusconi and dread his return to power, this is particularly true on the left.