Success in last night's confidence vote in the Chamber of Deputies has signalled merely a respite rather than a political victory for Italy's centre-left coalition government under Mr Romano Prodi. A political storm is forecast for the autumn. Mr Prodi will then be faced with the exceptionally difficult task of producing a budget acceptable to the social partnership of trade unions and business as well as to the Marxist Communist Refoundation party on whose votes he relies for a majority in parliament.
Communist Refoundation (RC) is an unreconstructed remnant of the once-powerful Italian Communist Party whose majority strand, the Democratic Left Party (PDS), is the major partner in Mr Prodi's coalition. RC's refusal to back NATO expansion into Eastern Europe brought about the re-appraisal of the government and the vote of confidence; its threats, therefore, to bring down the government on the paramount domestic issue of finances, must be taken seriously. The government has announced its intention to cut public spending by £5.4 billion, a policy bound to come under assault from the left. One of the major trade unions, the Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), has already warned the government that it may lose its support especially should a national wage agreement, reached in 1993, come under threat. The national organisation of industrialists, Confindustria, has also, but for different reasons, hinted that its backing for the government might also be withdrawn.
All these difficulties - which face many governing parties in coalitions in Western Europe - are made more dangerous in Italy by the state of the country's opposition. The opposition leader, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, faces a jail sentence on three counts of corruption and is also being investigated for possible links with the Mafia.
Mr Berlusconi has consistently claimed that he is being set up and framed as part of a left-wing conspiracy. Had he allowed a measure of transparency in his own financial affairs and those of his major corporation Fininvest, he might have been able to make these assertions from a much sounder footing.
Mr Berlusconi's coalition partners in the previous government, the separatist Northern League under Mr Umberto Bossi, are in even greater disarray. Mr Bossi has received a seven-month suspended sentence for "resistance to authority and disorderly behaviour" after a police raid on the headquarters of his self-styled Republic of Padania.
His colleague, Mr Roberto Maroni, who was interior minister in Mr Berlusconi's government, was given an eight-month suspended sentence for the same offence. In April of last year, Mr Bossi warned of an armed separatist rebellion and quoted the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland as his example. The Easter Rising remains a matter of political contention as to its political legacy to this State. As an analogy for Italy it is spurious in the extreme.
All of Mr Prodi's considerable political skills must be brought into play in the coming months if he is to steer his country away from crisis. It is greatly to be hoped that he will succeed.