ROME -- Conservative media magnate Silvio Berlusconi pressed forward Friday with his efforts to topple Italy's government as his allies and the hard left urged Prime Minister Lamberto Dini to resign before he was pushed out.


Berlusconi's Forza Italia party said the former prime minister would present a no-confidence motion in the government to parliament by Monday.


The motion would declare firm opposition to the 1996 budget and argue that a center-left vote of no-confidence in Justice Minister Filippo Mancuso, passed by the Senate on Thursday, meant the administration was no longer politically viable.


It was unclear when the motion would be debated in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. It would need an absolute majority to pass.


Its prospects were boosted when the Marxist party Communist Refoundation, with 24 deputies, said Dini should quit. "The Dini government now stains the democratic life of the country and should therefore go," the party said in a statement.


Dini, a former central banker who was in Berlusconi's cabinet last year, has relied on center-left support in Italy's hung parliament since taking over in January after the billionaire businessman resigned.


The sense of gathering crisis was fuelled by President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro's decision Thursday to cancel a visit to the United Nations in New York.


He must deal not only with the constitutional fallout from the Mancuso vote, but also with a storm unleashed by allegations by the justice minister, in the course of the no-confidence vote, that Scalfaro improperly interfered in sensitive judicial investigations.