Italy’s centre-left leader, Romano Prodi, brushed aside fears yesterday that his election victory could be reversed, but admitted it could be more than a month before the country had a new government.
”Our victory is safe,” he said as judges and electoral officials set about re-examining more than 40 000 contested votes which the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, insisted could change the outcome. Berlusconi has refused to concede defeat until the issue is settled.
Fresh controversy was stirred by the discovery of a box containing 900 votes in a Rome street. According to the news agency Ansa, the votes had been communicated to the electoral authorities.
But Beatrice Lorenzin, the head of Berlusconi’s party in Lazio, the region that includes the capital, said it was ”a very serious matter”. She claimed similar incidents had been reported in Tuscany and Sicily.
Despite fears that his tiny, two-seat edge in the upper house, the Senate, pointed to storms ahead if and when his government was formed, Prodi insisted: ”There is the chance to govern for five years.”
The opposition leader appeared bent on getting the public accustomed to the idea of a centre-left government. He began talks with party leaders on who should sit in the next Cabinet and dismissed a proposal by Berlusconi for a ”grand coalition” like the one in Germany.
”A grand coalition is not only alien to our programme, but it happens when no majority emerges from the elections,” Prodi said.
With the full preliminary results available, it could be seen that the centre-left alliance, known as the Union, benefited from a series of astonishing miscalculations by Berlusconi’s government. Though the Union won more votes in only one of the contests for the two chambers of Italy’s parliament, it ended up with a majority of seats in both, largely because of legislation introduced by the right.
Last December, Parliament approved a new electoral law restoring proportional representation after 12 years of choosing MPs with a mainly first-past-the-post system like that in Britain. In the lower house, the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies, the Union won only 25 000 more votes than Berlusconi’s House of Freedoms. But because of a bonus system in the new law, it was left with a majority of at least 66.
In the Senate, its thin advantage was due to a law passed by the Berlusconi government which allotted seats to Italians living abroad. It had been assumed that rich expatriates would plump for the right. Instead, they handed four of the six seats in the upper house to the Union.
Berlusconi said on Tuesday that since the number of contested ballots exceeded the margin of victory in the race for the Chamber of Deputies, ”nobody at the moment can say they have won”.
Electoral committees in each of Italy’s 20 regions, made up of a judge and two electoral officials, began scrutinising the disputed ballot papers on Wednesday. They are due to finish on Thursday night. After that, any disputes will have to be settled in the courts.
It usually takes several weeks for the head of state to complete the procedures required to form a new government. But, in this instance, there is a complication.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, is due to step down on May 18, and his advisers have told him it would not be right for him to choose the new prime minister.
Prodi said: ”The constitutional decision is that it will probably be the new president who will decide to give me the responsibility to govern. So it looks as if we shall have to wait until the second half of May.” – Guardian Unlimited Â