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Italy's premier-designate Matteo Renzi on Wednesday said he was ready to form a new coalition government after he concluded positively consultations with political parties.
The 39-year-old leader of center-left Democratic Party (PD) updated Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on the two-day talks and got to work with the aim to present his cabinet ministers on Saturday.
"After a day and a half of very tough meetings, dialogue and in-depth analysis, I am decidedly convinced that there are the conditions to do an excellent job," Renzi told a press conference.
The new government would be supported by the same majority as the last one of Enrico Letta, who used to be vice head of PD and was forced to resign from premiership last week after Renzi called a party meeting to oust him for ineffective pace in dealing with the economic crisis.
The New Center Right (NCD) party, which split from three-time premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) last year, will be junior partner in the coalition along with minor centrist forces.
The upcoming cabinet, the third led by an unelected prime minister since the end of 2011, will be sworn in before Napolitano and then will have to face confidence votes in parliament next week.
Renzi's intense consultations on Wednesday started with a much-awaited meeting with Berlusconi who assured that his center-right party will stay in a "constructive" opposition.
"We wish good luck to the premier-designate and his team. We agree with a rejuvenation of the government: today I met a prime minister who is half my age and this was a good signal," Berlusconi said. FI, he added, was available for "working together" on certain structural reforms.
Renzi then met representatives of his own party, who called on the new government to "open a new season" and accelerate the promised change of the labor, fiscal and public-administration systems.
Talks went less smoothly with Beppe Grillo, the comedian turned leader of the internet-based anti-establishment Five-Star Movement (M5S). The meeting only lasted a few minutes with Grillo not letting Renzi speak.
Grillo said he came to the consultations only to show his total indignation for an old-style politics marked by decades of scandals of which Renzi was part and that the grassroots movement wanted to overturn.
The M5S has especially criticized huge public spending in a country that entrepreneurs' association Confindustria on Wednesday described as "extremely weak" despite the recent recovery signs.
Though Italy's eight-quarter recession ended with flat growth in the third quarter of last year followed by a 0.1 percent rise in the last three months, industrial production was weighed down by bank credit limitations, weak domestic demand and loss of competitiveness, Confindustria said.
Renzi was confident, however, that his country "has the possibility" to overcome its longest recession in 40 years. "I promise you that I will change Italy for you, too," he said in response to Grillo.
The premier-designate had in mind an ambitious program of institutional and economic reforms that if implemented would give a shake to the troubled economy, analysts agreed.
Renzi last month reached an agreement with Berlusconi for a new election law to replace the present one blamed for political instability and presented the guidelines of a plan to simplify the labor system.
He was also working on laws to deprive the Senate of its law-making equal status with the lower house to lighten the political world and cut in the costs of bureaucracy at local levels.
The upcoming youngest premier in Italy's history said he will spend Thursday "in preparation" for his timely reform targets that he has wished will keep his government busy until 2018.
