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Italy's Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte remains
Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images
The Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also won the second vote of confidence in parliament.
He received a majority of 156 votes in the Senate in Rome, according to a spokeswoman.
In doing so, he achieved his minimum goal of maintaining power in the smaller chamber, but missed an absolute majority.
140 senators voted against the independent head of government.
The compulsion to form a new government or even hold a new election in the middle of the corona and economic crisis has thus been averted.
The smaller coalition partner Italia Viva of the former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi withdrew his two ministers from the cabinet in the dispute over Conte's policy last week.
The coalition was broken after 17 months.
The reason was the question of the distribution of the EU's Corona aid money (read more here).
The larger House of Representatives had previously expressed confidence in Contes' center-left alliance - five days after Italia Viva left the coalition.
He won the vote on Monday with 321 to 259 votes.
That Contes alliance achieved an absolute majority in the House of Representatives, the prime minister should have booked as a success.
His big coalition forces tried countless phone calls to get defectors and the help of other small parties.
If he had lost one of the two votes, he should have resigned.
Conte has been Prime Minister for a good two and a half years.
In the summer of 2019, he had already survived a break in the coalition and formed the 66th government of the Italian Republic with new partners.
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