Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister has announced he is leaving Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right faction. Angelino Alfano will form a new party that will back Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s fragile coalition. <br /><br />It’s another political setback for Berlusconi. It comes on the eve of a meeting at which he will rebrand his PDL party as Forza Italia. That’s the original name of his political movement. <br /><br />Tensions within the centre-right have been festering since Berlusconi’s tax fraud conviction in August. The media mogul maintains the move was purely political.<br /><br />Letta’s government tried to get him kicked out of the Senate on the grounds of the conviction. Berlusconi responded by attempting to destroy the Coalition by withdrawing from it. <br /><br />The tentative name of Alfano’s new breakaway party will be the “New<br />Centre-Right”. The group will take enough votes with it to keep the government coalition alive until 2015.
