Italy's President Sergio Mattarella dissolved parliament on Thursday, triggering a snap election, hours after Prime Minister Mario Draghi handed in his resignation amid a split in his ruling coalition.
Italy's government crumbled on Wednesday when three of Draghi's main partners snubbed a confidence vote he had called to try to end divisions and renew their fractious alliance.
Draghi, an unelected former central banker who has led a broad coalition for almost 18 months, tendered his resignation earlier on Thursday in a meeting with Mattarella.
He had tried to reassert his authority as parties began to pull in different directions before the planned end of the legislature in the first half of next year.
But three parties – Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Matteo Salvini's anti-immigrant League and the populist Five Star Movement – opted to sit out the vote, saying it was impossible to recover the trust lost last week.
The political crisis has upended months of stability in Italy, during which Draghi had helped shape Europe's tough response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and had boosted the country's standing in financial markets.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Draghi for his "unwavering support".
"I'm convinced that the active support of Italian people for Ukraine will continue," he said on Twitter.
Draghi drew warm applause from lawmakers when he made a brief appearance in the lower house of parliament on Thursday.
"Even central bankers have their hearts touched sometimes," he quipped as he received the ovation.
A bloc of conservative parties, led by the far-right Brothers of Italy, looks likely to win a clear majority at the next election, a study of opinion polls showed this week.
'Victims of madness'
The crisis was sparked when the Five Star group snubbed a key vote last week, despite warnings from Draghi that it would fatally undermine the coalition.
His downfall comes despite polls suggesting most Italians wanted Draghi to stay at the helm until the scheduled general election in May next year.
Salvini, who dined at Berlusconi's Rome villa after the vote, said election campaigning would begin Thursday, party sources told AGI news agency.
He said Draghi and Italy were "victims of Five Star madness". Five Star head Giuseppe Conte retorted that the Movement, which began life as a protest party, had been "the target of a political attack. We were forced to the door".
Enrico Letta, head of the centre-left Democratic Party, which voted in support of the prime minister, said toppling the Draghi government meant "going against Italy and Italians' interests".
Anxious investors were watching closely as the coalition imploded.
Milan's stock market dropped 2 percent on opening Thursday.
Supporters of Draghi had warned a government collapse could worsen social ills in a period of rampant inflation, delay the budget, threaten EU post-pandemic recovery funds and send jittery markets into a tailspin.
France's European affairs minister Laurence Boone said Draghi's expected resignation would open a "period of uncertainty" and mark the loss of a "pillar of Europe".
Based on current polls, a rightist alliance led by Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, a post-fascist party, and including Forza Italia and the League would comfortably win a snap election – if the three parties can get along.
Such a coalition "would offer a much more disruptive scenario for Italy and the EU" than Draghi's national unity government, wrote Luigi Scazzieri, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)
