ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and top ministers backed a constitutional reform proposal introducing the direct election of the prime minister, in an effort to end the country's chronic political instability.
Meloni made constitutional reform a key policy plank of her right-wing coalition after winning power in September last year.
Italy has had almost 70 governments since World War Two, more than twice the number in Britain and Germany. Repeated attempts to produce a more robust system, the last in 2016, have always floundered amid myriad, competing visions.
Government officials said that under the proposed reform coalitions will have to put forward premier candidates at the election, in a bid to enhance stability by forging a stronger bond between the government and voters.
The government also intends to change the electoral law to ensure that elections produce workable majorities, avoiding the kind of hung parliaments that emerged from ballots in 2013 and 2018, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.
"We have taken a big step towards the 'reform of reforms', which will give stability to the country and restore centrality to the popular vote," Reforms Minister Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati said in a statement.
The cabinet meeting will be held on Friday, sources said.
The main left-leaning opposition forces, the 5-Star Movement and the Democratic Party (PD), said they would fight the reform plans because they endanger the checks and balances of the 1948 constitution drawn up after Benito Mussolini's dictatorship.
Other opposition groups appeared more willing to cooperate.
Matteo Renzi, who stepped down as premier after his failed reform in 2016, said his small centrist Italia Viva party would be ready to back the direct election of the prime minister.
In the current system parties from the left and the right hold talks to form a government whenever no side can claim a majority in both houses of parliament. The prime minister need not necessarily be an elected politician.
Any change to the constitution needs to secure a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament - something that is hard to envisage given the splintered nature of Italian politics. Failing that, it can be passed by a referendum.