The 43rd Govt

Press, 3 December 1982, Page 6

The 43rd Govt

NZPA-Reuter Rome After an absence of almost two decades, Amintore Fanfani returns to the Prime Minister’s palace today as Christian Democratic leader of Italy’s forty-third post-war Government. He was last in power in 1963. At 74, he steps into a breach left by the Republican, Giovanni Spadolini, who resigned over Ministerial squabbles on November 14. Mr Spadolini was the first non-Christian Democratic Prime Minister since World War Two, and Mr Fanfani’s re-emergence at the head of a coalition appears to reinstate the Christian Democrats as the dominant party in Italian politics. The Ministers who caused the row are now out of office — and so is Mr Spadolini’s party, which elected to stay out of the new Government, reducing it to four parties. These are Mr Fanfani’s Christian Democrats, the restive Socialists, the Liberals, and the Social Democrats.

Nevertheless Mr Fanfani, who heads one of the most influential “corrente” or factions in the Christian. Democrats, has made few changes in the Spadolini Cabinet lineup. With his team he faces the same enormous economic problems that bedevilled his

predecessor. His economic proposals have been criticised as the fruit of political compromise rather than determined policy. A former Stock Exchange Commission chairman, Guido Rossi, attacked his plan for tackling the huge Budget deficit as laughable. But Mr Fanfani’s friends say that he will perform with the same political acumen that governed his previous 1220 days in the Prime Minister's office. ' Mr Fanfani named a 28member Cabinet. Excluded were the Treasury Minister, Nino Andreatta and the Socialist Finance Minister, Rino Formica, whose bickering led to the resignation of the Spadolini Government. Other main portfolios, including Foreign Affairs, Interior, Justice, and Defence were left unchanged in a Cabinet that political sources said was clearly the fruit of a delicate balancing act between the claims of four coalition parties.