Italian conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi will enjoy comfortable majorities in both houses of the incoming parliament, the final results announced by the interior ministry yesterday showed.
The center-right coalition that won the general elections held on Sunday and Monday will have 168 seats in the Senate — 10 more than the minimum 158 needed for an absolute majority — against 130 for the center-left and three for centrist lawmakers.
Berlusconi won 15.5 million votes, or 47.3 percent, against rival center-left flagbearer Walter Veltroni, who won 12.5 million, or 38 percent, in the Senate race, the ministry said.
Centrist Pier Ferdinando Casini won nearly 1.9 million, or 5.7 percent.
Twenty other formations including communists and Greens in the newly formed Rainbow Left party did not garner enough votes to enter the Senate.
The Rainbow left won slightly more than one million votes, or 3.2 percent.
In the lower house Chamber of Deputies, the center-right will have 340 seats against 239 for the left and 36 for the center.
Polling for the lower house saw Berlusconi’s forces win some 17 million votes, or 46.8 percent, against 13.7 million or 37.5 percent for Veltroni and two million, 5.6 percent for Casini.
Yet Berlusconi’s triumph will send a shiver of apprehension through Brussels where memories are still fresh of the way his government let Italy’s public finances run out of control, threatening the stability of the euro. Romano Prodi, the former European commission president and Italy’s former prime minister who narrowly defeated Berlusconi two years ago, reversed the trend. But to cut the budget deficit, he made the center-left deeply unpopular by putting up taxes and clamping down on evasion.
Italy’s next government faces an unenviable task in trying to reinvigorate a failing economy. That was reflected in the generally cautious rhetoric of both leading candidates in the campaign. Last year, the EU announced that the Italian economy had been overtaken by Spain’s.
Other symptoms of Italy’s failure are legion. They include a flag — carrier airline, Alitalia, which is losing 1 million euros (US$1.58 million) a day, and a refuse crisis that engulfed Naples and the surrounding region of Campania and appeared to many Italians to embody their country’s plight.
During the campaign, Berlusconi vowed to slash taxes and boost infrastructure spending in an effort to stimulate the economy. He insisted the budget deficit could nevertheless be contained by improving efficiency in the public administration and embarking on a huge program of public asset sales.
The turnout, usually high in Italy, was three points lower than at the last general election in 2006 — 82 percent compared with 85 percent, initial data from the interior ministry showed. There was speculation that the drop reflected disillusion, particularly among the young, with an aging and cronyism-prone political class.
Ironically, the country looks set for five years of government headed by a 71-year-old man who has a string of trials behind him for alleged financial wrongdoing. All his convictions have been overturned on appeal and other charges against him expired under statutes of limitations.
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