Romano Prodi delivers his speech during the inauguration of the Judicial Year in Rome, January 25.

Discussions Friday between the Italian president and political leaders could determine if the country will face early elections or an interim government following the resignation of Premier Romano Prodi.
President Giorgio Napolitano has long said he doesn’t want to hold another national election until Parliament reforms Italy’s electoral system, which is widely blamed for contributing to the country’s chronic political instability. Decades of revolving-door politics have produced 61 governments since World War II.
But he may be forced to call an early vote if he determines there is no consensus among political leaders to create an interim government to carry out the reforms. In the meantime, Prodi will remain in office in a caretaker role.
Prodi resigned late Thursday after the Senate voted 161-156 to sink his 20-month-old center-left coalition in a fiery session in which one senator was spat on, fainted and was carried out on a stretcher.
On Friday, lawmakers from the opposition center-right--who passed Italy’s existing electoral law during the last government--made clear they wanted to proceed to a vote without changing the law, putting pressure on Napolitano from their relative position of strength following Prodi’s downfall.
“It’s been months since (electoral reform) has been discussed, and there have been different positions registered by both the center-right and the center-left,“ said Gianfranco Fini, leader of the right-wing National Alliance, who is widely considered to have his eye on the premier’s office.
Elected in April 2006, Prodi’s government was shaky from the start, plagued by infighting among parties ranging from pro-Vatican centrists to Communists and Greens. But it lurched toward collapse this week after a small Christian Democrat party, whose votes were vital to its Senate majority, yanked its support.
It was the second time that Prodi, a former European Commission president, had been forced to resign because of a betrayal by his purported allies. His first term as premier ended after two years in 1998 when he lost the support of the radical left.
After the defeat, lawmakers from the conservative coalition of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi cheered.
Berlusconi, the billionaire media magnate who lost to Prodi in 2006 and is eager to return to office, called for swift new elections.
“Now, as quickly as possible, we need to give Italians a government that works,“ he said amid cheers from his supporters. He said he was “completely“ opposed to the creation of an interim government, apparently confident that his party and allies would fare well under the existing electoral system.
But some lawmakers are pushing for an interim government under which reforms of the electoral law could take place. The system gives small parties--like the ones that sank Prodi’s government--disproportionate weight in fragile coalitions.
The leader of the largest party in the outgoing government, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, contended that early elections without a new law would only “push the country into a situation of dramatic crisis.“
Veltroni, the head of a leftist group of former Communists and pro-Vatican centrists, is considered the likely candidate for the left.
Analysts and news reports have floated the names of several neutral and respected figures in recent days who could head an interim government, including Italy’s central bank chief Mario Draghi; Mario Monti, a former EU anti-trust commissioner; or the current Senate speaker Franco Marini.
Prodi, a former economics professor, had pledged to reform Italy’s costly pension system and boost growth by liberalizing many areas of Italy’s economy, from insurance and banking services to taxis and pharmacies. But during his rocky 20 months in power, the reforms were often watered down after street protests or under pressure from the radical left in the coalition. Italy’s economy, while emerging from a period of zero growth, has remained sluggish.
“The country leaves Prodi here and moves on, I don’t see him as a meaning political figure in the future,“ said Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor at Rome’s John Cabot University.
During Thursday’s debate, Senator Nuccio Cusumano announced he was breaking with his party to vote in favor of the government. Some lawmakers from his UDEUR party--which had defected from Prodi’s coalition earlier this week--responded with calls of “traitor!“
Cusumano was spat upon, fainted, and was carried out on a stretcher. He returned to vote “yes“ a few hours later.
AP.COM

Kenya’s recent presidential election unleashed turmoil that has so far claimed more than 500 lives and displaced thousands of people.
Blame has been pinned on Kenya’s ethnic divisions: The Luo tribe of challenger Raila Odinga has disputed the electoral victory claimed by incumbent President Mwai Kibaki of the Kikuyu tribe.
Since the election, the Kikuyu have been targeted by the Luo and other groups, while the Luo and their fellow oppositionists have been brutalized by the police.
But although this conflict does indeed run along ethnic lines, ethnic diversity is not to blame for the disaster. The key culprit is, rather, a serious flaw in Kenya’s governance: the weakness of its national legislature.
Many observers assume that ethnic divisions cause civil war. According to such thinking, ethnic rivalries lurk below the surface, ever ready to erupt if sparked by a galvanizing event.
This view seems to fit Kenya. A hotly contested and probably fraudulent election fueled festering resentment against the dominant Kikuyu tribe, prompting the Luo and other tribes to attack. Government forces, led by President Kibaki, a Kikuyu, responded with repressive measures against their tribal adversaries.
But this story is misleading. In fact, political scientists have found that there is no statistical correlation between ethnic diversity and civil war. Some ethnically diverse countries experience civil war, but many more are pacific. After all, Kenya has always been ethnically divided but is generally touted as a bastion of stability, democracy and prosperity in East Africa.
If ethnic diversity didn’t cause the recent round of violence in Kenya, what did? The answer: a Feeble Parliament.
We recently conducted statistical analyses showing that countries with weak legislatures are at greater risk of civil war. It’s easy to see why. Where the legislature is strong, opposition groups can hope to affect policy through their representatives in parliament, without the need to resort to violence.
But Kenya’s parliament is anemic.
In our global survey of the power of national legislatures, Kenya ranks only 126th out of 158 countries, well behind other developing nations such as India (44th), South Africa (48th), Benin (59th), Brazil (60th) and Ghana (82nd).
In Kenya and other countries with weak legislatures, the presidential contest is a winner-take-all affair. The Luo know that they cannot hope to constrain President Kibaki with the checks and balances to be found in a system with a powerful parliament.
Instead, they face a frustrating choice between subordination to the president and violently contesting his rule in the streets. The Kikuyu, Kibaki’s tribe, know that they cannot relinquish the presidency peacefully without forfeiting control over policy and patronage. Tragically, in the presidential election, everything seems to be at stake.
It didn’t have to be this way. Like Kenya, Benin and Ghana are ethnically divided countries that have experienced closely fought and possibly flawed presidential elections in recent years.
But Benin and Ghana have stronger legislatures, so the losers in presidential elections have less fear of being politically excluded. They have reacted to defeat by using their sway in parliament to control the president, and they have not resorted to mass violence.
American and European efforts to advance peace and democracy in developing countries have focused on building civil society, but the United States and Europe have, unfortunately, underinvested in bolstering formal institutions such as national legislatures.
Stemming the mayhem in Kenya and preventing presidential elections from igniting civil wars elsewhere requires strengthening parliaments. Peacemakers and democrats in the developing world, as well as aid agencies in the West, face no more urgent imperative.
WASHINGTONPOST.COM

A young Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) fighter (l) rides a convoy to a camp in Panamao in southern Jolo island, Philippines, May 20, 2006.

The current president of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo, whose election in 2004 was deeply flawed, but probably not fraudulent, is currently beset by a sea of troubles that threaten to overwhelm her regime.
The economy is faltering, an energy crisis looms and investor confidence drains away as political uncertainty rises. At the end of November there was a coup attempt led by Sen. Antonio Trillanes who only got elected to the Upper House because of his notoriety after leading a previous attempt to overthrow Arroyo in 2003. He was elected from jail with 11 million, mainly military, votes to become one of the 12 senators voted in last May.
November’s coup attempt was more farce than threat with the police and military swiftly arresting the plotters who had barricaded themselves into Manila’s five-star Peninsula Hotel. Yet it was all too symbolic of Arroyo’s and the country’s situation.
The legality of her own seizure of power in 2001 from former President Joseph Estrada was highly questionable. Now she is walking an impossible political tightrope.
On one side the millions in deep poverty are demanding land reform that will break up the plantations of the 40 large families that run the country; the liberal professions want to control AIDS and population with contraception; and the West wants an end to the murder and disappearance of leftwing activists with the army brought under control.
The wave of disappearances and murders orchestrated and led by elements within the army and tolerated when outsourced to plantation private militias continues barely abated.
These extra-judicial killings have increased significantly since 2001 when Arroyo seized the presidency from Estrada. The numbers claimed vary from 900 according to the Human Rights Group Karapatan to an unbelievable figure eight times lower than the police’s.
Those killed or disappeared are leftwing activists, human rights workers and journalists. The government has taken some cosmetic measures to address the problem--the Supreme Court has done more--but the army remains in a state of denial regarding its role. While the situation has eased a little for journalists, activists continue to disappear and die.
All of which is topped off by a series of ongoing insurrections driven by class, nation and religion but not limited to the southern island of Mindanao. A communist insurgency has continued since the 1970s, driven by the inability of the Partido Komunista Pilipinas (PKP) to organize legally, coupled with the experience of the anti-Japanese resistance struggle in World War II, and sandwiched by major agrarian revolts before and after the war.
The PKP’s military wing, the New People’s Army, was established in 1969. Weakened by a resurgence of parliamentary politics after the fall of Marcos and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, there are still an estimated 7,000 guerrillas in parts of Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. A peace process initiated in the mid-1990s has been in limbo since 2004 and in 2006 Arroyo encouraged a “dirty war“ against the party after claiming the PKP’s collusion with that year’s coup attempt.
In Mindanao it’s nation, religion and even tribe that underpin the complex Moro insurgency. A consequence of the increasing marginalization of the indigenous Muslim majority dispossessed of their lands by a rapacious wave of frontier-style Christian colonization. The left-leaning Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a classic colonial liberation movement, signed a peace agreement in 1996 in exchange for autonomy within the newly established Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). This new structure has not been a success with a massively under-resourced administration; deeply corrupt local leaders oversee and manage incompetence and graft.
Despite this failure, the more religiously orientated Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is now engaged in peace talks, brokered by Malaysia, currently stalemated by the demand for ARMM-plus, an enlarged and properly resourced autonomous area for the indigenous Muslim community.
On the fringe the Abu Sayyaf Group that splintered from the MILF terrorizes parts of Mindanao alongside fragments of Indonesia’s al-Qaida franchise Jemaah Islamiyah seeking a safer haven. Recent fighting has seen “rogue“ elements of both the MNLF and MILF clash with the Philippines military with over 50 marines killed, some of which were mutilated, with no record of insurgent casualties.
Where do the Philippines go from here? Already there is a jockeying for position ahead of the 2010 presidential elections with personality trumping politics time and again as the 40 families select favorite sons or daughters to carry their interests in the forthcoming elections.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP