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ICPS BCN DEBATS 5.Qxd BCN Political Science Debates, 2007/5, pp. 5 -34 Down to the Last Ballot! The Italian Elections of 9-10 April 2006 MARIO CACIAGLI Università degli Studi di Firenze The centre-left opposition won the Italian elections of 9-10 April 2006 by only 24,000 votes, which is 0.6 percent of the 38 million voters. It has also won the majority of seats in the Senate thanks to the votes of Italians living overseas. Since the majority in the Senate is only by two seats and the Senate has the same powers as the lower chamber, Prodi’s government, which has Berlusconi after 5 years taken over from, may have a very difficult time. In regard to the party system that has emerged from the elections, a model of “fragmented bipolarity is confirmed”: a change-over in power has occurred for the third consecutive time and many parties, perhaps at odds with one another, have remained within the two coalitions. Keywords: Electoral Behavior, Elections, Italy Until the Early Morning and Eight Days Later There is a long tradition in Italy, interrupted by only a few recent exceptions, which requires that elections be carried out over a day and a half. The polling stations open on Sunday at seven a.m. and close at ten p.m. They open again at 7 a.m. on Monday and close definitively at two in the afternoon. In previous elections, different from those of 9 and 10 April 2006 (the competition in the general elections has been bipolarized since 19941), it was possible to know the results, not definitive but at least trustworthy as a trend, in a few hours, thanks to the exit polls taken and the statistical projections on the ballets already counted, as happens, nowadays, in nearly the entire world by means of techniques with greater or lesser sophistication. 5 In 2006, the exit polls gave their first verdict at three in the afternoon on Monday 10 April. They were, as I will say further on, a failure. They gave one of the competing coalitions, that of the centre-left, the Unione, from three to five percentage points of advantage over the centre-right, the Casa delle libertà, both in the lower chamber as well as in the Senate. The exit polls continued to give advantage points to the centre-left in its second round and the few others that followed. By five in the afternoon, with the adverse data of the first projections, the advantage of the centre-left in the Senate was almost nil and disappeared shortly thereafter. As of eight p.m., the first real data confirmed the uncertainty, as the centre-right appeared to be leading the centre-left in the Senate but was slightly behind in the lower chamber. The uncertainty continued throughout nearly the entire night; there were exciting ups and downs, but the centre-right constantly recovered in both chambers. If at ten at night the majority of the centre-right in the Senate was ensured by one or two seats, by three in the morning projections were impossible to make for the lower chamber, where, according to the new electoral law, the winning of the first seat would have granted to the winning coalition a conclusive awarding of seats. It was understandable why the forecasts had been impossible when shortly before four a.m. the Interior Minister, after the counting of the last ballot in the furthest corner of the country, communicated the definitive data. The difference between the two coalitions was only 25,224 votes out of the 38 million votes cast. “A sigh”, commented Romano Prodi, the candidate for president of the Government of the Unione. “A rigged election”, affirmed the president of the Government and head of the candidacy of the Casa delle libertà, Silvio Berlusconi, who immediately demanded a re-count of all the votes. Since the Corte di Cassazione makes the final decision on the definitive and official result of an election in Italy, only the Supreme Court of Appeal could end the dispute. Hence, eight days later, on 19 April, the Corte di Cassazione declared the result for the lower chamber, and confirmed the victory of the centre-left, but by 24,755 votes, only 469 less than those provided by the Ministry in the early morning of 11 April (Table 1). 6 Table 1 General Elections of 9-10 April 2006. Results for the Lower Chamber for the Two Coalitions Votes % Unione (Centre-left) 19.002.598 49.79 Casa delle libertà (Centre-right) 18.977.843 49.73 Difference +24.755 +0.06 Italian voters overseas Unione 459.454 55.5 Casa delle libertà 368.516 45.5 Difference +90.938 +10.0 As is known, such a narrow victory is not, in spite of Berlusconi’s stupor, a completely exceptional case. Among the recent precedents, the very few votes that separated George Bush Jr. and Al Gore in 2000, or the SPD from the CDU/CSU (close to eight thousand) in 2002 . Among less recent cases: the 0.2% of the popular vote that allowed John Kennedy in 1960 to surpass Richard Nixon. Having been awarded the majority, the centre-left obtained 340 representatives out of 630. The seven deputies (or representatives) chosen by the Italian residents living overseas were added to these (something new in the Italian electoral legislation), which is a subject worth returning to in the course of this work. Nevertheless, the seven did not make any solid contribution to the new majority. The senators elected overseas did contribute decisively to the configuration of the Senate. After counting the ballots in Italy, the centre-right had most of the votes and seats: 155 as opposed to 154 of the centre-left. The advantage of only one seat was due to the electoral system and in spite of the advantage in votes that it had (+428,456) (Table 2). On Tuesday 11 April, once the slow count of Italian overseas voters had finished, it turned out that the centre-left had gained four seats as opposed to the two of the centre-right, while the seventh of those chosen –an Italian from Argentina– declared himself as an Independent. Thus, in the final count, there were 158 senators for the centre-left and 156 for the centre-right. Hence, the composition of the Italian Parliament based on the elections of 9-10 April 2006 can be seen in Table 3 below. 7 Table 2 General Elections of 9-10 April 2006. Results for the Senate for the Two Coalitions Votes % Unione 16.725.077 48.95 Casa delle libertà 17.153.256 50.21 Difference -428.179 -1.26 Italian voters overseas Unione 426.544 56.1 Casa delle libertà 333.110 43.8 Difference +93.434 +12.3 Table 3 General Elections of 9-10 April 2006. Results for the Two Coalitions Lower chamber Senate Unione 347 158 Casa della libertà 283 156 Independent 1 Total 630 315 Something that Berlusconi does not understand also occurred here: a majority of popular votes and a minority of seats. But that depends on the electoral system. All the manuals on electoral systems remind us, among others, of the case of the United Kingdom in 1951: the Labour Party members obtained the majority of votes but, under the English system, the conservatives obtained the majority of seats, and Winston Churchill became their leader and Prime Minister. We could also mention the cases of the United States, where the candidate defeated by the number of Electoral College votes obtained the majority of the popular vote, as happened to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. After a week of controversy and uncertainty, and after five years and two centre-right governments (both headed by Berlusconi) a change-over in power took place in Italy for the third consecutive time. What had never happened in the 45 years of the First Republic, has happened in the 12 of the transition: the victory of the centre-right in 1994 was followed by that of the centre-left in 8 1996, which was followed by a victory of the centre-right in 2001 and once again by the new victory of the centre-left in 2006. A Hard, Tense Election Campaign with an Exasperated Mobilization It is worth taking a few steps back now to reconstruct the antecedents of the vote of Italians in April 2006, which was an election that once again appeared, as it had since 1996, as a referendum for or against Berlusconi confronted, as in 1996, by the coalition headed by Romano Prodi. The tone of the campaign, which in fact had begun in January, was already harsh at the beginning and became even more so in the last phase. Berlusconi was the protagonist thanks to his control of the television networks (three of his own and two of the three state run channels2) and to the advertising financed with the powerful resources of his personal fortune. Berlusconi lamented up to the opening day of the official campaign the “injustice” of the law called par condicio that regulates the time of television transmissions, and street posters, and uses criteria of fairness to divide all of the competitor’s use of the media. Despite the limitations, Berlusconi was able to occupy the campaign stage thanks to his communicative ability and his populist instinct. He led an obsessive fight. He led it alone, without ever considering the leaders who were his allies, who were reduced to being bystanders of his show. Berlusconi tried to get on many public television programmes after being continuously present on his own channels, and gave monologues or interviews.
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