Renzi strains Italy coalition in bid for new party

ROME - Former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi announced on Tuesday that he was leaving the center-left Democratic Party, or PD, to form his own party, potentially destabilizing the days-old ruling coalition.

"I have decided to leave the PD and to build together with others a new house to do politics differently," Renzi wrote on Facebook, barely a week after the PD's coalition with the Five Star Movement won a confidence motion in parliament.

Renzi is not himself part of the new government, formed through the unlikely alliance between PD and Five Star in order to thwart far-right leader and now ex-interior minister Matteo Salvini's bid to call snap elections he thought would make him premier.

But Renzi, who was hailed as a reformer when he became Italy's youngest premier at the age of 39 in 2014, was a divisive figure within the PD, particularly for the party's left which is largely loyal to party leader Nicolas Zingaretti.

"After seven years of friendly fire I think we must take note that our values, our ideas, our dreams, cannot every day be the object of internal quarrels," Renzi wrote.

He resigned as premier in 2016 and fraught relations within the PD prompted repeated speculation that Renzi would split to form his own, more politically centrist, party.

"The victory we got in parliament against populism and Salvini was important to save Italy, but it's not enough," Renzi wrote.

Renzi said that around 30 lawmakers would announce loyalty to him but he said he would continue to support Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte's government.

He called Conte on Monday to reassure him that "I'm leaving the PD but (my) support for the government remains certain," the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.

Between 18 and 20 MPs will follow Renzi, out of the PD's 111 total. Twenty MPs are needed to form an autonomous parliamentary group. Around 10 senators out of the PD's 51 would also follow, the Corriere reported.

"Today the PD is a set of currents," Renzi told Tuesday's La Repubblica newspaper.

"And I fear that it will not be able on its own to respond to Salvini's attacks and to the difficult cohabitation with the M5S," he said, referring to Five Star.

"I believe that there is space for something new. Not from the center or the left, but from what has occupied the least-used space in Italian politics: the space of the future," he told the left-leaning daily.

"I won't tell you the name but it won't be a traditional party," Renzi said.

PD leader Zingaretti lamented what he called "an error".

"We are sorry. ... But now let's think about Italians' future, work, environment, business, education, investments. A new agenda and the need to rebuild hope with good governance and a new PD," Zingaretti tweeted.

Agence France-Presse