Italy's "professor" learns lesson in betrayal

ROME (Reuters) - Dubbed the "professor" during his political career, Romano Prodi tried and failed twice as prime minister to teach allies to unite behind him.

Last time, in 1998, it was communists who revolted against him two-and-a-half years into a five-year term. A decade later, it was Catholics who turned the knife after just 20 months.

He was forced to resign on Thursday after losing a Senate confidence vote, and says he will not stand again for premier.

It was a final, bruising lesson in betrayal for the mild-mannered politician, who sought during his turbulent stint in office to project the very calm that he wished for his jittery coalition.

Right to the end, Prodi -- an unusually mellow politician, especially by Italian standards -- declared himself to be "serene" even as allies turned against him.

A former European Commission president, Prodi realigned Rome's foreign policy upon taking office by putting Europe before the United States, unlike the conservative government before him.

He staunchly advocated multilateral bodies like the United Nations and NATO, and while he sped Italy's withdrawal from Iraq he also boosted its peacekeeping profile by taking command of the U.N. mission in Lebanon.

Saddled with a razor-thin majority following Italy's closest election in history, he was forced to make a virtue out of necessity -- using confidence votes to ram through legislation that continually tested his centre-left coalition.

But his daring had limits, and survival in office came at the price of enacting more ambitious reforms for an economy that has lagged the euro zone for more than a decade.

"MR. MORTADELLA"

If his predecessor, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, was known as a man who thrived on controversy, then Prodi was known for trying to stay above the fray of Italian politics.

Critics seized on his quiet, mumbling exterior as a sign of a man asleep at the wheel. But allies said the man known even to his friends as "mortadella" -- a plump sausage from his native Bologna -- was a crafty, dependable politician.

He was the only man to have beaten Berlusconi -- a billionaire media mogul known for his charisma and communications skills. But defeating Berlusconi proved easier than staying in power.

A law graduate who studied at the London School of Economics and taught at Harvard, Prodi knew that keeping his communists-to-Catholics coalition united would not be easy.

He created U.S.-style primary elections that he handily won, and then made allies publicly agree to stick by him until the next scheduled elections in 2011. But such pledges mean little in country which has seen 61 governments since World War Two.

Elected partly due to voter discontent over the economy, Prodi's government proudly pointed to belt-tightening that cut the budget deficit last year below the European Union limit for the first time since 2002.

It also started trimming Italy's massive debt pile, still the third highest in the world in absolute terms.

But the "professor" hardly gets a top grade on the economy.

Italian industrial output has been falling and economists are cutting their growth forecasts almost by the week. The economy is now seen expanding only around 1 percent this year, keeping Italy's role as a euro zone laggard.

With consumer and business confidence levels plunging, it looks like Italians tuned out Prodi's reassurances of better times ahead a long time before his allies did.

(Editing by Michael Winfrey)