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ROME — Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy won a budget vote in Parliament on Tuesday but the tally showed that he no longer has the support of the majority, a huge humiliation that raised the pressure on him to resign in the face of an escalating debt crisis that has hobbled Greece, threatens Italy and could infect the rest of Europe. The budget vote came hours after Umberto Bossi, a key ally in Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition, publicly asked him to step aside for the sake of the country, the euro zone’s third-largest economy and a new epicenter of...

Silvio Berlusconi has won a crushing victory in the Italian general election to become prime minister for the third time. The 71-year-old media magnate defeated Walter Veltroni, the 52-year-old leader of the Democratic Party, by a considerable margin and has a large enough majority to rule Italy for a full five-year term. Mr Veltroni, who was a popular mayor of Rome before entering national politics, conceded defeat five hours after the polls closed, saying that the result was clear. "I have telephoned Mr Berlusconi to wish him well in the job," he said, adding that he was comforted that Italy...

A SENIOR Italian government adviser on labour relations was murdered by gunmen apparently opposed to his proposals to make it easier to sack workers. Marco Biagi, 52, an affable professor responsible for drafting the government's package of labour market reforms, was shot dead by two attackers while cycling home on Tuesday night in Bologna, the nerve-centre of the Italian far Left. The murder is the most dramatic evidence so far of the political tension welling up in Italy since the Right-wing government of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, took power last year, backed by the "post-fascist" National Alliance and the...

A senior minister in the Italian government said on Monday his remarks had been misinterpreted after he was quoted as saying the navy should fire on boats carrying illegal immigrants to Italy's shores.

Right-wing tide surges straight to the heart of EuropeBy Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels (Filed: 22/04/2002) EUROPE'S rising Right-wing tide swept into the core countries of the European Union yesterday, rocking Germany's Social Democrats and threatening France's socialist government.Over the last two years, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, and Norway have all turned against the centre-Left consensus that had such a lock on Europe during the 1990s, opting instead for law-and-order parties promising tax cuts, deregulation, and a much tougher line on immigrants.But the pace is now quickening as ever more radical figures build mass support, often outflanking the conventional centre-Right...