Allies Shun Berlusconi’s New Party

With his customary brio, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is forming a new political party to propel him back to power, vowing Monday to go forward without his allies on the center-right, who are growing exhausted with him.

Impatient that the fragile and unpopular government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi remains standing, Mr. Berlusconi appeared before reporters here on Monday to announce that he had collected eight million signatures from Italians who want new elections.

“We all have the responsibility not to waste these millions of signatures,” Mr. Berlusconi, 71, Italy’s richest man and the leader of the Forza Italia party he founded in 1993, said in a hastily called news conference that, with blue balloons and giant video screens outside, felt more like the start of a well-financed election campaign. “This would be fatal.”

Despite his determined enthusiasm, Mr. Berlusconi’s announcement seemed to come at a low point for him politically, and it thus seemed uncertain how popular his new movement might be. To start, his political allies, crucial to keeping him in power during his five years as prime minister, have defected and refused to support his new party.

“It’s not even worth talking about,” commented Gianfranco Fini, leader of the National Alliance and a longtime ally who has criticized Mr. Berlusconi, bitterly and publicly, over the last week.

“Propaganda,” said Pier Ferdinando Casini, head of a Christian Democratic coalition.

Mr. Fini, Mr. Berlusconi’s foreign minister, has been particularly critical over what he called Mr. Berlusconi’s failed strategy in forcing new elections. Last week, Mr. Prodi survived a bruising budget vote in the Senate, despite Mr. Berlusconi’s daily predictions that the government would fall and that elections could be called immediately.

“Let’s begin to reflect on our errors so we don’t repeat them,” Mr. Fini said in an interview over the weekend with the newspaper La Repubblica. “Let’s stop saying, ‘Sooner or later Prodi will fall and we will win again,’ without doing anything constructive. Let’s begin to put questions to ourselves: Why did we lose the last elections?”

Mr. Fini and other center-right politicians have been urging negotiations with the center-left on a new electoral law regarding the nation’s complicated rules on parliamentary elections, something that Mr. Berlusconi had steadfastly refused to consider. Mr. Berlusconi’s government had pushed the current law just before the elections last year and it is largely blamed, even now on the right, for not allowing a wide enough majority for any side, left or right, to govern effectively.

Nearly all political forces in Italy agree that a new electoral law is mandatory for new elections.

On Monday, Mr. Berlusconi demonstrated the political dexterity he is famous for, both repudiating his own electoral law and declaring a new willingness to discuss a new one even with Mr. Prodi’s government. Specifically he said he would discuss a proportional electoral system that might result in a “grand coalition” of the center, like in Germany.

Such a new law, he said, would avoid the current chaotic fragmentation of many small parties.

“To govern a country this way is very difficult,” Mr. Berlusconi said.

Several converging forces seemed to lead to Mr. Berlusconi’s decision to launch a new party, to be called either the “party of freedom” or the “people of freedom.”

While he lost the elections last year, the margin was narrow and he has maintained a good deal of personal popularity, which he apparently believes could lead him again to the prime minister’s office, the sooner the better. Renato Mannheimer, a pollster, said that Mr. Berlusconi and his allies are favored by 27 to 29 percent of voters (though he cautioned that the polls were taken before Mr. Berlusconi’s allies began to flee).

The only other coalition that polls closely, he said, is the new Democratic Party, formed by the fusion of two center-left parties and led by Rome’s popular mayor, Walter Veltroni. Mr. Berlusconi’s call for a new party that leans toward the right, but attracts centrist elements like Christian Democrats and disaffected undecided voters appears aimed at creating a rival.

But Mr. Berlusconi also seemed aimed at maintaining his dominance with increasing pressure from younger rivals like Mr. Fini and Mr. Casini, frustrated at Mr. Berlusconi’s long and idiosyncratic leadership of the right.

“He is putting a kind of lid on this bottle, but the bottle is full of gas,” said Giuseppe Sacco, a political science professor at the Free University of Rome. “It is fermenting very much.”

Mr. Berlusconi first announced the new party on Sunday in northern Italy, and it came as a surprise to many of his supporters. Center-left leaders have largely dismissed it as an admission of weakness from Mr. Berlusconi at a difficult time. Mr. Prodi said he was unperturbed.

“Despite Berlusconi’s overwhelming media campaign, my government is going forward,” he said Monday.