Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government relied on the support of a rebel group of conservative deputies loyal to his bitter rival Gianfranco Fini to get through Wednesday's vote.
Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under fire from large parts of the Italian establishment as his government struggles to re-establish its authority after narrowly surviving a confidence vote in parliament last week.
Berlusconi's centre-right government relied on the support of a rebel group of conservative deputies loyal to his bitter rival Gianfranco Fini to get through Wednesday's vote, and problems are stacking up for the 74 year-old prime minister.
He faces business leaders impatient at the infighting that has overshadowed policy for much of the year, a looming battle with judges over justice reforms and condemnation from the Vatican over his idiosyncratic sense of humour.
A senior figure in the Northern League, a Berlusconi ally which wants early elections, said it would be clear within three weeks whether the government could survive.
Months of corruption scandals and political acrimony have combined with a sluggish economy to create a generalised climate of rancour that has held up any serious attempt at reform and undermined respect for the government and politics in general.
"The country has lost its institutional sense, the compass has been lost, someone opened the gates of the zoo and they've all got out," Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of Italy's industrial champion Fiat said at the weekend.
"It's difficult to go around the world and explain what's happening in Italy. It's shameful," he told reporters.
A poll published in the Corriere della Sera newspaper on Sunday showed 56% of people had a negative opinion of politics with 28% expressing outright "disgust" and a sharp rise in the numbers expressing resigned indifference.
Berlusconi himself has done little to raise the tone, attracting withering criticism from the Vatican after one amateur video showed him making a joke about the Holocaust and another uttering a highly offensive Italian blasphemy.
The videos, shown on news websites, drew a rare criticism from the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano, which called the remarks "deplorable jokes which offend the feelings of believers and the sacred memory of the six million victims of the Shoah."
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