11 April 2006

The people of Italy have spoken...

We're just not entirely sure what they've said.

Italy is probably going to have a recount, since Berlusconi wants one and this thing is very close anyway. There's also the ex-pats vote still to be counted.

Prodi will probably win the Chamber of Deputies, but he could still lose the Senate. Without the Senate... we play the contest again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It looks academic now, thanks to Berlusconi's dodgy granting of voting rights to Italian ctizens resident abroad, but your point about the Senate is wrong - one of the parties in Berlusconi's House of Freedoms indicated that if Prodi's Union won the lower house but not the upper house, they'd break the deadlock by defecting to Prodi's side in the interests of creating a stable government. The only thing that could have saved Berlusconi was a clear victory for his bloc in both houses - any split results and his coalition partners would have ditched him, either for a different right-winger (Fini being the most likely choice) or to support Prodi.