As the House geared up to give the government's controversial 2007 budget the final nod, Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa said on Wednesday that the manoeuvre would save the country from a "financial emergency".
Addressing the House a day before the definitive vote, the minister said that "this budget will lift us out of a situation of financial emergency and straighten the public accounts".
"I believe in this budget," he added.
The 34.7-billion-euro budget contains extensive spending cuts and tax hikes which centre-left Premier Romano Prodi says are essential for curbing Italy's rising deficit and public debt levels but which have sent his approval ratings plummeting.
Approved by the Senate in a confidence vote last Friday, the budget now faces a final hurdle in the House, where it will be put to another do-or-die vote on Thursday.
Prodi has opted for confidence votes not only to speed up approval of the budget, which must be passed before the end of the year, but also to prevent it being sunk by defectors from his own alliance, which ranges from Communists to centrist Catholics.
The government would be forced to resign if it lost a confidence vote.
Prodi's first, 1996-98 government was brought down in a budget dispute.
The government's announcement to the House on Wednesday that it was resorting to a confidence vote was met with howls and jeers from the centre-right opposition.
The Silvio Berlusconi-led opposition, which has branded the manoeuvre a tax sting, led a mass demonstration against the budget in Rome at the start of December which drew hundreds of thousands of Italians on to the streets.
PRESIDENT ALSO CRITICAL.
President Giorgio Napolitano also criticised the government on Wednesday, protesting over the use of confidence votes to push through the budget.
The president, a former Communist who was elected head of state by parliament earlier this year, said that "parliament's legislative role is being heavily conditioned by increasingly serious distortions".
"Once again this year, the budget will have been approved in both chambers by a confidence vote called by the government on a single article consisting of an abnormal number of amendments," Napolitano said.
The budget bill is one long, unwieldy document containing more than 1,000 clauses or amendments.
Napolitano urged both sides of the political divide to "show more responsibility toward the general interests of the country".
Arguing that citizens were "tired" of the two rival coalitions' constant bickering, Napolitano said that "there is a worrying detachment between politics, public institutions and the people".
The government also remained in embarrassment on Wednesday over a measure benefitting corrupt public administrators that was slipped into the budget bill last week ahead of the Senate vote.
The measure would give magistrates less time to investigate accounting crimes committed by public officials against the State, making it more likely for the crime to be extinguished under the statute of limitations.
The State Audit Court says 70% of its trials would be affected by the reform, which cannot be removed from the budget document without entailing further parliamentary passages.
Prodi has sought to ease the row by promising to revoke the measure, if necessary via a special decree to be approved before the end of the year when the budget becomes law.
Outraged members of the governing coalition have demanded to know how the reform came to be inserted in the budget in the first place.
The measure was drawn up by Calabrian Senator Pietro Fuda, who is now in the centre left but was formerly a member of opposition chief Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.
Fuda is considered close to Calabria's regional government chief Agazio Loiero, who has left the centre-left Daisy party to form his own group.
The reform was signed by six other members of the centre left, the majority of them from the Daisy party.
Several centre-left officials said the reform had been a mistake, inadvertently inserted into the poorly drafted budget bill.
But some critics said it was aimed at easing the legal woes of a host of local administrators in Calabria accused of accounting irregularities by the State Audit Court.
Infrastructure Minister Antonio Di Pietro, a famous former anti-graft prosecutor who heads the small Italy of Values, has threatened to quit the nine-party governing coalition unless the reform is cancelled.
Former premier Berlusconi accused the government of passing "self-serving laws", a criticism repeatedly levelled at him by the centre left during his five years in government.
