Italian election in balance as overseas votes counted

Italy’s parliamentary election hung in the balance today as the country counted ballots cast for six new senate seats by Italians living abroad.

Near-final returns showed opposition leader Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition winning the lower house, while conservatives led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi held a one-seat lead in the senate, with results for six seats elected by Italians abroad still yet to be counted.

Prodi’s coalition claimed four of the six seats, giving it the necessary margin for victory, but official results hadn’t been released.

A jubilant Prodi declared victory in a speech to supporters early today.

“Until the very end we were left in suspense, but in the end victory has arrived,” he said. “Now we have to start working to implement our program and unify the country.”

Berlusconi’s spokesman contested the victory claim, and a top official in his Forza Italia party indicated the conservatives would request a recount “in order to have a result that we really can consider certain and final”.

Prodi’s allies conceded after his announcement that results in the Senate were still not complete.

They were expected later in the day.

The election marks the first time Italian citizens living abroad had the right to vote by mail in a parliamentary election, thanks to a 2001 law sponsored by Berlusconi’s conservative government soon after it came to power.

The law created four huge electoral districts to represent Italians who live overseas. Eighteen politicians will be chosen to represent this new constituency, 12 in the Chamber of Deputies and six in the senate.

Politicians criss-crossed continents and flew across oceans in a scramble to win over the 2.6 million voters abroad.

Politicians particularly focused on Argentina, home to hundreds of thousands of Italians. There were about 400,000 eligible Italian voters in the North and Central America expatriate district.

At the close of the deadline for submitting ballots last Thursday, the Italian Consulate in New York, where the highest number of Italian citizens in the United States are concentrated, said it had received more than 18,000 ballots.

During his tenure as premier, Berlusconi, a flamboyant billionaire, had strongly supported President Bush over Iraq despite fierce Italian opposition to the war. Prodi, an economist, said he would bring troops home as soon as possible, security conditions permitting.

But the issue was largely deflated before the campaign began, when Berlusconi announced that Italy’s troops there would be withdrawn by the end of the year.

For hours after the vote ended yesterday, projections and returns swung dramatically back and forth between the two sides, and without the vote from abroad, the election’s outcome was still unclear. Voter turnout was about 84%.

The senate and lower chamber of parliament have equal powers, and any coalition would have to control both in order to form a government. Some centre-left and centre-right leaders have said if neither side controls both houses, new elections should be called.

Final results in the lower house showed Prodi’s coalition winning 49.8% of the vote compared to 49.7% for Berlusconi’s conservatives. The winning coalition is automatically awarded 340 seats in the 630-member chamber.

The senate is made up of 315 elected politicians. There are also seven senators appointed for life, but by tradition they do not take sides.

If parliament is split between the two coalitions, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi could try to name a government of technocrats at least until another election.

He could also seek to fashion a coalition of left and right, but considering the bitter divisions among Italy’s political parties, that seemed unlikely.

There is no clear provision in the Italian constitution to deal with a split parliament, and there are no precedents.

“These results mean the country is divided in two. There needs to be a provisional government for a few months, then new elections,” said Marco Piva, a 49-year-old banker from Padova, as he took the train to work this morning. “This is the worst result that we could have had.”

Culture Minister Rocco Buttiglione and several other politicians said both sides must pull together, if only to handle urgent economic matters and the election of a new president after Ciampi’s mandate expires in May.

“We have to immediately send a message to the markets, to whomever wants to invest in Italy that the country is not going to fall apart,” he said.

Berlusconi, a 69-year-old media mogul and Italy’s longest-serving premier since the Second World War, was battling to capture his third term with an often squabbling coalition of his Forza Italia party, the former neo-fascist National Alliance, pro-Vatican forces and the anti-immigrant Northern League.

The 66-year-old Prodi, a former premier, was making his comeback bid with a potentially unwieldy coalition of moderate Christian Democrats, Greens, liberals, former Communists and Communists.

Italians were mainly preoccupied by economic worries. Berlusconi failed to jump-start a flat economy during his tenure, but promised to abolish a homeowner’s property tax.

Prodi said he would revive an inheritance tax abolished by Berlusconi, but only for the richest. He also promised to cut payroll taxes to try to spur hiring.