ROME (AFP) -- Italy's Senate on Friday gave the green light for the 2008 budget, with six senators for life making the difference in a third and final vote of confidence on the spending bill.

The measure passed by 163 to 157, thanks to ""yes"" votes by 98-year-old Nobel medicine laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini and five other senators for life including former president Francesco Cossiga, normally considered close to opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi.
The risky vote came amid warnings from several senators in the centre-left coalition led by Prime Minister Romano Prodi that their loyalty is wearing thin.
Prodi has called a summit of his fractious nine-party coalition, which ranges from far-left communists and Greens to centrist Catholics, for January 10.
The budget is a new step towards cleaning up Italy's public finances, which spent years in the red under the conservative Berlusconi, prime minister from 2001 until last year's hard-fought elections.
However, it is less austere than the package first approved by the Prodi cabinet in September.
Prodi has pledged to balance the budget by the end of his term in 2011 -- if he survives until then.
In the lower House of Deputies, where Prodi enjoys a comfortable majority, the budget passed by 296 to 92 last Saturday.
Later on Friday the Senate gave its final approval to a key bill on pensions and job security with almost the entire opposition refusing to take part in the vote, the last before the holiday recess. The bill, which passed easily last month in the House of Deputies, has drawn fierce criticism from the far left flank of Prodi's government.
Under the legislation, which is based on an accord reached between Prodi and labor unions, the retirement age will rise from the current 57 years to 60 in 2011 for those who have paid into the system for at least 36 years.
The last reform, passed under the Berlusconi government, would have raised the age to 60 starting next year.
The new law also includes measures on job security which are especially opposed by the Greens and communists.
Each Senate vote is a risk for the prime minister, who must use all his negotiating talent to keep dissidents in line and to sway the senators for life.
Prodi, 68, barely survived a confidence vote, 160 to 158, in the Senate on December 7 over an immigration decree making it easier to deport EU citizens on security grounds.
In the coming months, Prodi will face with other critical votes, including refinancing Italy's mission in Afghanistan, opposed by the far left.
Should Prodi lose a Senate vote, he may be forced to resign, as he did briefly in February over foreign policy.
But that would not necessarily mean new elections, since both government and opposition want electoral reforms to correct the endemic splintering of Italian politics.