Prodi coalition in Italy weakened by bickering

ROME, Apr 22 (Reuters) Just three days after his election victory was confirmed, Italy's prime minister-in-waiting Romano Prodi faced a rupture in his coalition and an ally predicted the fall of his government.

The prediction, by Piero Fassino, leader of Democrats of the Left (DS), came as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's supporters continued to demand vote recounts even after a supreme court ruling on Wednesday confirmed Prodi's wafer-thin victory.

Fassino's gloomy forecast sprang from a tussle for the prestigious position of lower house speaker between Fassino's party and the Communist Refoundation led by Fausto Bertinotti.

Members of the DS were left smarting when their candidate Massimo D'Alema pulled out of the race on Friday to avoid a coalition collapse after Bertinotti, who toppled Prodi's 1998 government, threatened to quit if he did not get the job.

''We have already seen after two days, that this is how it will finish,'' said Fassino, whose party gained the largest number of votes in the April 9-10 election, the closest in post-war Italian history.

''Is it possible that I cannot trust (Prodi) any more?'' he added in an interview with la Repubblica newspaper.

Prodi, who spent the day at his family home, in the northern city of Bologna, denied there were rumblings of discontent.

''Everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be fine,'' he told reporters after returning from a cycle ride.

His calm was not shared by Italian newspapers that unanimously said he could ill afford bickering with the smallest majority in Italian history and with Berlusconi, who has refused to concede defeat, plotting a fierce opposition.

Berlusconi's lawyer Niccolo Ghedini in a television interview said he had demanded a further vote recount and reiterated the media tycoon refused to concede the election.

UGLY SPECTACLE ''Instead of trying to prove its seriousness and unity, this miniscule majority is fighting over seats and giving the impression this is what it thinks government is about,'' Sergio Romano, a leading political commentator, wrote in Corriere della Sera under the headline ''An Ugly Spectacle''.

Adding to Prodi's woes, the head of another small coalition party, the centrist Democratic Union for Europe (UDEUR), said he was unhappy with the centre-left leader's first steps and threatened to quit the alliance unless things changed quickly.

''If we carry on like this, we're going to end even before we have begun,'' UDEUR leader Clemente Mastella said in a statement.

Opponents had said Prodi would be unable to hold together his broad alliance, which spans diehard communists to Roman Catholic moderates, but few expected the cracks to emerge even before he had formally taken office.

Wednesday's supreme court ruling upheld Prodi's win thanks to a advantage of 24,755 votes in the Chamber of Deputies, but his ability to govern hangs on keeping his coalition together in the Senate where the court confirmed today he holds just a two seat majority.

Newspapers reported Berlusconi believed he had already eroded that majority by garnering support from centrists who were disillusioned by the communists' strength and he would be able to block the left's attempts to form a government.

''A plot is in the air. Prodi, like Julius Caesar, risks being stabbed in the Senate. There are already many who want to play the part of Brutus,'' centrist Il Tempo newspaper wrote in a front-page editorial.

REUTERS KD PM2312