Reuters/AFP/DPA/Rome

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, approaching a confidence vote in his new government yesterday, pledged to cut labour taxes, free up funds for investment in schools and pass wide institutional reforms to tackle Italy’s economic malaise.

Facing parliament for the first time, the 39-year-old Renzi – Italy’s youngest premier – sketched out an ambitious programme of change in an hour-long speech delivered in his trademark quickfire style interspersed with occasional jeers from the opposition benches.

“If we lose this challenge, the fault will be mine alone,” he told the Senate. “We have only one chance: this one. And we are telling you, looking you in the eye, that if we were to lose, we would not seek alibis.”

“This is an Italy of possibilities, an Italy of fundamental change,” he said, stressing the “urgency” of implementing reforms in “a rusty country... gripped by anxiety”.

The eurozone’s third-largest economy is in urgent need of potentially painful reforms and is weighed down by a 2tn-euro public debt.

Backed by his own centre-left Democratic Party (PD), the small centre-right NCD party, centrists and other miscellaneous groups, Renzi should win the vote in the 320-seat upper house, which was due around 2100 GMT (around midnight Qatar time).

But there will be close attention paid to the size of his majority following signs of dissent in his own party.

Former premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) party is in opposition, although it has agreed to support key decrees on a case by case basis.

Party members seemed less than enthused by the government programme.

“It couldn’t get any worse than this. I hope for Italy’s sake that Renzi is better than he seems,” said Maurizio Gasparri, an FI senator, while FI deputy Daniele Capezzone said there were “no desirable objectives, just a worrying vagueness”.

The anti-establishment Five-Star movement – Italy’s other main opposition party – has slammed Renzi for stealing the top job and called for elections, and some political watchers say Renzi’s failure could significantly boost their numbers.

The movement’s senator Paola Taverna slammed “the posturing, the little smiles, the arrogance in front of a country which wanted to hear a speech of change”.

A bold-faced Renzi stared down critics hollering insults from among the movement’s benches and spoke out against populism and for Europe.

The outgoing mayor of Florence, who won the leadership of the PD in December, forced his party rival Letta to resign as prime minister earlier this month after repeatedly criticising his government’s record.

Renzi promised sound public finances, which he said was a duty Italy owed to its own children rather than to its European Union partners, but offered little detail and did not say whether his government would seek any easing in tight EU budget limits as he has suggested in the past.

He promised to make it cheaper for companies to take on staff by reducing payroll taxes with a double-digit cut in the so-called tax wedge – the difference between what it costs a company to employ a worker and the worker’s take-home pay – in the first half of the year.

He said the measure would be financed by spending cuts and other measures and said the government would evaluate increasing tax on financial income to pay for a wider labour shake-up.

On Sunday, his chief of staff Graziano Delrio caused a stir by suggesting the government was considering raising taxes on government bonds, which are popular with Italian savers.

Renzi took office on Saturday promising a radical increase in tempo, with an overhaul of the electoral and constitutional system to ensure more stable governments in future, tax and labour reforms and a shake-up of the bloated public administration, all within his first 100 days.

The tone of his speech was direct and colloquial, in contrast to the sober style of his two predecessors, Letta and Mario Monti.

Noting that, at 39, he was not even old enough to hold a seat in the Senate, where the minimum age is 40, he said that politics had lost touch with citizens.

“Let’s end the chorus of grievances,” Renzi said. “The future of Italy does not lie in complaining from morning to evening.”

“If we’d paid the same attention to what people say in their local markets that we often paid to the financial markets, we would have noticed that the first thing people want is simplicity,” he said.

A comprehensive package of reforms to the notoriously sluggish justice system would be completed by June and long-promised electoral and constitutional reforms would be in place and ready to go before parliament by the end of March.

Yesterday’s Senate vote will be followed by a separate vote today in the lower house, where the PD has a strong majority, and that will wrap up the parliamentary process required by every new government.