Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters
Mario Monti, Italy’s caretaker prime minister, at a news conference in Rome on Sunday.
ROME — After weeks of speculation, Italy’s caretaker prime minister, Mario Monti, said Sunday that he would not run as a candidate in national elections that are expected in February, but was open to leading the government if parties that endorsed his pro-Europe, pro-reform agenda asked.
At a much-anticipated news conference in which he strove to avoid being swept into the blood sport of Italian party politics, he said that he would give political forces “appreciation, encouragement and, if asked, my guidance.” He called on parties and citizens across the political spectrum to adopt his anticrisis “Monti Agenda,” saying its motto was: “Change Italy, reform Europe.”
Mr. Monti later told a television interviewer that he would not rule out allowing a centrist grouping to name him as its candidate for prime minister, if there were “sufficient forces and guarantees of credibility in their commitment.” (Under Italian law, parties name their candidate for prime minister before elections.) Polls have placed the center-left Democratic Party first, but Mr. Monti could be a contender if it does not win enough votes to govern in a balloting expected on Feb. 24 and 25.
Mr. Monti, an economist, was appointed to replace former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi amid fierce economic turmoil in November 2011, helping restore the country’s international credibility. But his government’s tax increases have been unpopular and deepened Italy’s recession, the longest since World War II. After Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party withdrew its support from the Monti government this month, Mr. Monti said he would step down, opening the most chaotic season in Italian politics in decades.
President Giorgio Napolitano dissolved Parliament after it passed Italy’s 2013 budget on Friday, and Mr. Monti handed in his resignation. He will remain caretaker prime minister until after elections.
On Sunday, in a nearly three-hour news conference, Mr. Monti tried to use a new political language, going beyond the old categories of right and left. “I think that the axis in the coming years can be framed as ‘will to change’ and ‘Europe’ more than left and right,” he said.
Indeed, he appears to be laying the groundwork for a civic-minded, Catholic centrist movement, which Italy has not had since the Christian Democratic Party, which governed Italy during the postwar period, collapsed in a bribery scandal in the early 1990s. Questions about his future role have divided centrists.
The grouping that has been courting Mr. Monti includes a veteran centrist party, the Union of Christian Democrats, and a civic movement led by the president of Ferrari, the carmaker, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. A handful of former Berlusconi loyalists have also indicated their support for Mr. Monti, including Gianfranco Fini, a former speaker of Parliament.
The centrists are also allied with Andrea Riccardi, the minister of cooperation — who is effectively the minister of intercultural relations — in the Monti government and a co-founder of a liberal Catholic group, the Community of Sant’Egidio, a sign that Mr. Monti enjoys strong support from the Roman Catholic Church. The church remains a powerful political force in Italy. Still, polls indicate that even with Mr. Monti’s blessing, these centrists would most likely not win more than 15 percent of the vote.
Mr. Monti called Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party, “a legitimate candidate for prime minister of a coalition.”
Mr. Bersani, whose party has been undercut by Mr. Monti’s de facto candidacy, issued a terse statement, saying: “We need more change, more equality, more work. And so we need a political majority that isn’t ‘strange’ but that is real and coherent, strongly pro-Europe and strongly reform-minded.”
For his part, a furious Mr. Berlusconi, who has been striking an increasingly populist line in order to draw votes to his collapsing party, took to the airwaves to hammer Mr. Monti. “Last night I had a nightmare, I woke up screaming — there was still a Monti government,” he said on state-run television.
Mr. Monti on Sunday offered a witheringly ironic critique of Mr. Berlusconi, saying he had difficulty “following his line of thought.” He noted that Mr. Berlusconi had called his government a disaster, then asked him to lead a center-right coalition, an offer he said he refused.
Mr. Monti was also cleareyed about the mixed record of his government, which raised taxes and the retirement age but was unable to carry out significant structural reforms because the parties supporting the government sometimes undermined its efforts.
He said that the right, namely Mr. Berlusconi’s party, had blocked justice reform. “It’s better to pass laws that are ‘ad nationam’ rather than ‘ad personam,’ ” implicitly criticizing Mr. Berlusconi’s tendency to want laws that protect his own interests.
And he said that the hard left — especially the C.G.I.L. labor union, which has more retirees than workers among its membership and is a key constituency of the Democratic Party — had blocked more aggressive changes to Italy’s labor laws. “They find it difficult to evolve, and this harms Italian workers,” Mr. Monti said.
