Italian PM Enrico Letta resigns
AP
Nicole Winfield AP February 15, 2014, 7:59 am
Prime Minister Enrico Letta has driven himself to the Italian president's palace and resigned.
Letta was sacked by his own party on Thursday in a back-room mutiny designed to catapult Florence's young mayor into the helm of Italy's government.
President Giorgio Napolitano accepted the resignation and immediately scheduled talks with political party leaders on Friday and Saturday.
After that, he is expected to ask the head of Letta's Democratic Party, Florence Mayor Matteo Renzi, to try to form a new government.
Letta is the third premier to fall from grace in as many years amid Italy's turbulent politics and economic crisis.
The country has a crushing unemployment rate, with some 40 per cent of young Italians jobless.
Renzi, meanwhile, spent Friday doing what he does best, being the popular, down-to-earth mayor who has used his outsider status on the national scene to project himself as a breath of fresh air for Italians fed up with the self-absorbed political class.
The 39-year-old presided over a Valentine's Day ceremony in Florence's city hall, feting Florentines celebrating their 50th wedding anniversaries.
A day earlier, he engineered a Machiavellian internal no-confidence vote in the party against Letta, accusing him of failing to lift Italy out of its economic and political doldrums.
Without the party's backing, Letta had no choice but to resign.
The timing of the ouster was ironic, given that the national statistics bureau Istat reported on Friday that fourth-quarter GDP edged up 0.1 per cent, the first positive growth since mid-2011.
In a tweet as he arrived at Napolitano's office, Letta said he was resigning and thanked "all those who have helped me".
