We didn't mean it, profess Prodi's 'traitors'

THEY'VE been branded "traitors" and "bastards" and worse. But the two left- wing senators who brought down Italy's prime minister, Romano Prodi, on Wednesday night say they didn't mean to do it.

"Maybe if I knew my vote was so fundamental, I would have reflected a bit," said Fernando Rossi, a 60-year-old communist, sounding apologetic.

He and the other senator, a Trotskyite with the Communist Refoundation Party, tried their best yesterday to deflect blame. But with left-of-centre newspapers screaming headlines like: "They betrayed 19 million voters", it was a hard sell.

"First off, I didn't vote against it. I abstained," said a defensive Franco Turigliatto, who says he will quit the Senate. "Second, it wasn't me who was the determining factor."

Until last April's election, Italy's Left had been in the wilderness for five years while Italy's richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative media mogul, ran the country with a pro-US foreign policy that included Iraq peacekeeping.

Mr Prodi accelerated the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, but angered senators like Mr Rossi and Mr Turigliatto by not ending Italy's participation in an Afghanistan peacekeeping mission.

They and other pacifists in the governing coalition wanted Mr Prodi to reverse Mr Berlusconi's authorisation of a US military base expansion in the city of Vicenza. They joined tens of thousands in a march in a protest held in Vicenza on Saturday.

The Senate vote in favour of Mr Prodi's foreign policy got 158 votes - two short of the 160 it needed.

"We're a country of madmen," concluded Massimo D'Alema, the foreign minister. "This is a shock. A real shock".

But it was dj vu for Mr Prodi, whose nine-month government ending on Wednesday followed another stint as prime minister nine years ago. Then, as now, the communists turned on him.

Mr D'Alema, a former communist himself, said ultra-leftists were trouble for a centre-left government like Mr Prodi's that governed with a razor-thin one-seat majority in Senate. "What do you expect, if you put Trotskyists in parliament? This is the least that could happen."

Stefano Folli, a political analyst, said: "I believe Italy is today the only country in the West where nearly 10 per cent of the voters believe in an anti-American platform. This explains the aversion to foreign policy, which is an aversion to the alliance with the United States in its various forms."

Now Mr Prodi needs to scrape together a new coalition if he is to stay in power. Failure could pave the way for the return of Mr Berlusconi, a figure the left dreads because of his friendship with the US and the immense power he wields at the top of a media empire.