Pressure grows in ruling Italian party for autumn vote

ROME (Reuters) - Prime Minister Mario Monti no longer has the backing in parliament to adopt more reforms and Italy should consider holding early elections in the autumn, the economic spokesman for a major ruling party told Reuters on Sunday.

"In this political context and with this parliament, Monti does not have the strength to carry out more reforms," said Stefano Fassina, economic spokesman of the centre-left PD, one of the two main parties Monti depends on for his majority.

"We should verify quickly if there is any chance of reforming the electoral law and if that doesn't work we should consider the possibility of bringing forward the budget law for 2013 and voting in the autumn," he said in an interview.

Italy's electoral law repeatedly fails to produce stable majorities but the parties have widely divergent views on how to reform it and few analysts expect them to find common ground ahead of the next election.

Although there has been some media speculation about the possibility of an autumn election some six months ahead of the natural end of Monti's mandate, Fassina is the first senior member of a ruling party to openly advocate such a move.

He admitted that his views did not necessarily reflect those of the whole party, and he said the PD would begin thrashing out a common position on the matter at a leadership meeting on Friday.

With the other main ruling party, Silvio Berlusconi's PDL, in total disarray after heavy defeats in local elections last month, Fassina's comments underscore the domestic difficulties facing Monti as the euro zone debt crisis intensifies.

On Friday Berlusconi said Italy should leave the euro unless the European Central Bank agreed to pump more cash into the economy, only to play down his remarks the next day as a "joke".

Italy's borrowing costs have risen steadily in recent weeks as investors fret over looming elections in Greece and the state of Spain's banks.

The gap between yields on Italian 10-year bonds and safer German Bunds, a measure of how risky investors consider Italy to be, was around 4.7 percentage points on Friday, compared with a recent low of around 2.8 points in March.

(Reporting by Gavin Jones)