ROME — In his narrowest escape yet, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi barely survived a confidence vote on Friday, saving his government from collapse but leaving it all but incapable of legislating effectively. 
 
 With 316 votes for and 301 votes against, Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition won the vote. But it failed to secure a solid majority, making it increasingly difficult for him to pass legislation aimed at protecting Italy from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Had he lost, Mr. Berlusconi would have had to resign, marking the end of an 18-year political era in which the billionaire businessman shaped Italian politics in his own image, entwining the country’s fate with his own. 
 
 In what the daily Corriere della Sera called “an atmosphere of interminable agony,” analysts said the Berlusconi government was now hanging by a thread and could fall at the next bump in the road — when enough disgruntled lawmakers from within Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition calculate that they would be safer jumping off a sinking ship rather than staying aboard and risking drowning. 
 
 Mr. Berlusconi called the confidence vote after failing to pass a routine measure this week. Addressing lawmakers on Thursday, the prime minister said he was the only “credible alternative” able to govern Italy through the economic crisis, and refused to step down. 
 
 Since 2009, the European debt crisis has felled governments in Ireland, Portugal and Slovakia, led to early elections in Spain and a cabinet reshuffle in Greece. So far, Mr. Berlusconi has proven to be a tough outlier — not least because the European Central Bank in August agreed to buy Italian debt. But the bank did this in exchange for promised structural changes that the government has not yet carried out, a mix of tax increases and changes to the pension system. The results of Friday’s vote promise to make that even more difficult. 
 
 This week, opposition leaders — and the president of Italy, in an unusually strong statement — told Mr. Berlusconi that surviving a confidence vote was not the same as governing. In the statement, President Giorgio Napolitano said the prime minister had to show the “necessary cohesion” to tackle Italy’s budget deficits and to propose “adequate solutions to the urgent problems of the country, including in meeting its European obligations.” 
 
 Despite deep divisions over economic policy, the center-left opposition has repeatedly called on Mr. Berlusconi to step down. 
 
 “This government will die from confidence,” the leader of the center-left opposition, Pierluigi Bersani, said after Friday’s vote, the ANSA news agency reported. “Starting tomorrow, the political problems will be even more evident,” he added, reiterating his calls for Mr. Berlusconi to step down. Another leading opposition politician, Antonio Di Pietro of the Italy of Values Party, has repeatedly accused Mr. Berlusconi of buying the votes of would-be dissidents within his own center-right coalition. 
 
 On Friday, Mr. Berlusconi was saved by loyalists who prefer to have the government limp along rather than fall and potentially be replaced by a group of nonpolitical technocrats with a mandate to carry out the structural changes including tax increases, changes to the pension system and a growth stimulus bill now deadlocked in Parliament. 
 
 Foreign investors and many of Italy’s business leaders hope for such a technical government, but lawmakers have resisted out of fears of losing power. 
 
 Friday’s vote made clear that Italy had been living with the shadow of Mr. Berlusconi. 
 
 “In this interminable twilight, the man who was Berlusconi remains true to his salesman’s essence,” the satirist and political commentator Massimo Gramellini wrote recently in the Turin daily La Stampa. He will continue to survive, Mr. Gramellini added, until his supporters “start to deny that a man like that, capable of selling us nothing for 20 years, ever really existed.” ||||| Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi survived a confidence vote in Parliament on Friday, but his narrow majority raises doubts over his ability to govern effectively when the country needs a steady hand during its economic crisis. 
 
 Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi sits in the lower chamber to attend a confidence vote, in Rome, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Italy's Parliament has begun debating before a confidence vote that will determine... (Associated Press) 
 
 Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi raises his hand as he sits in the lower chamber of parliament to attend a confidence vote, in Rome, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Italy's Parliament has begun debating before... (Associated Press) 
 
 Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi sits in the lower chamber to attend a confidence vote, in Rome, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Italy's Parliament has begun debating before a confidence vote that will determine... (Associated Press) 
 
 Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi gestures in the Lower Chamber, in Rome, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Berlusconi faced a confidence vote in Parliament Friday that is seen as the most serious threat to his... (Associated Press) 
 
 Berlusconi's conservatives won in a 316-301 vote in Parliament's lower house. After days of tension, the premier's allies clapped when the result of the vote was announced. 
 
 Berlusconi has been weakened by sex scandals and criticized for his handling of Italy's economy. He has been facing repeated calls for his resignation from his political rivals, labor unions and parts of the business community that once considered him their savior. 
 
 Even some of his own allies have openly expressed disappointment, with at least two deserting the crucial vote Friday. 
 
 Had he lost the vote of confidence, Berlusconi would have been forced to resign _ about 1 1/2 years before the end of his term, in 2013. 
 
 Three ratings agencies have downgraded Italy's public debt, citing the country's political gridlock and low growth prospects as key reasons. The vote Friday appeared to do little to reassure markets. 
 
 "The best signal that Italy could have sent to the markets would have been to boot Mr. Berlusconi out, but it has failed to do so," said Sony Kapoor, managing director of Re-Define an Economic Think Tank, shortly after the vote. "With Mr. Berlusconi still at the helm, there is nothing that Italy can do from within that will restore market confidence." 
 
 The 75-year-old leader has steadfastly hung onto power despite the scandals and four criminal trials in Milan. He has always maintained his innocence and blamed what he says are overzealous, left-leaning prosecutors bent on ousting him from power 
 
 He insisted that there is no alternative to his government. He said the vote Friday amounted to an "ambush" by the opposition, and moments after the vote, he spoke to reporters about his plan to spur the country's moribund economy. 
 
 Italy is under pressure to come up with growth-promoting measures to avert being dragged into the widening sovereign debt crisis. 
 
 This week, Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, who takes over the helm of the European Central Bank on Nov. 1, urged the government to act more quickly to implement reforms that can spur growth _ beyond the austerity package that put Italy on the path to balance its budget by 2013. 
 
 Otherwise, Draghi warned that the rising cost of borrowing to service national debt seen over the last three months will eat up "no small part" of the austerity package approved by Parliament last month. 
 
 "The goal of relaunching growth is finally largely shared, but the adoption of the measures necessary so far have banged up against apparently insurmountable difficulties," Draghi said.
– Silvio Berlusconi squeaked through a confidence vote in the Italian parliament today, but the agonizingly close 316-301 vote didn’t exactly inspire, well, confidence. Berlusconi’s majority is so slim that it effectively cannot pass legislation, the New York Times reports, and analysts say that the slightest bump in the road could break the fragile coalition entirely. Berlusconi called the vote himself after failing a routine vote this week and refusing calls to step down. Berlusconi survived thanks to loyalists afraid his government would be replaced by a non-political technocratic one seeking structural changes to Italy’s economy—a government they’d have no place in. Of course, many business leaders were hoping for exactly that. “The best signal that Italy could have sent to the markets would have been to boot Mr. Berlusconi out, but it has failed to do so,” one economic think tank director tells the AP. Opponents, meanwhile, complained that Berlusconi can win confidence votes, but cannot govern. “He only knows how to stay stuck in his seat using tricks,” one opposition leader complained.