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NOTE ON THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS

Rome - April 14, 2006 by Emma Bonino The recent Italian elections, with one of the highest turnout of our recent history (more than 84%) ended up with a very narrow victory of the center-left coalition led by Romano Prodi, which won by a mere 0.1% (25.000 vote). As I write, Berlusconi has not conceded his defeat yet, and is calling for a recount of the void votes. The numbers say that there will not be a reversal of the final results. Due to the effects of the new electoral system, changed by Berlusconi’s coalition few months before the elections, which from a mixed first-past-the-post and proportional system moved back to a fully proportional system with blocked lists of candidates and a threshold of 2% for the Chamber and 3% for the Senate. Romano Prodi enjoys a wide margin at the Chamber of Deputies (around 60 MPs) but a very narrow one of 2 or 3 Senators in the higher Chamber. Our list, La Rosa nel Pugno (Rose in the Fist) got 2.6% of the popular vote. It was the only brand new party taking part in the elections. The Rose in the Fist, which adopts the symbol of the Socialist International that we Radicals bought from Mitterrand in 1972, was launched in September 2005 and, with very limited financial resources, was able to bring together the Italian political traditions of the radicals, socialists, liberals. Over the last few months, we were able to aggregate several politicians and intellectuals coming for the Democrats of the Left, who recognized the importance of making the separation of "Church and State" a priority in Italy, but also, thanks to a pro-scientific reform referendum campaign of last year, several among the most know University professors, scientists and researchers working in the field of biogenetics and bioethics decided to join our lists to send a strong political message to restore freedom of scientific research in a country that suffered limitations and prohibitions by the Berlusconi's Government in 2004. In the month before the elections, all opinion polls were predicting for us a popular support between 3 and 4% in both Chambers. The law regulating media access, also knows as "par condicio", together with a political management of the presences on TV made it almost impossible for us to make our "secular" platform known to millions of voters. Due to repeated violations of the "par condicio" law, both by public and private media groups, the Italian Authority for tele-communications issued sentences calling to redress the disparity of treatment against the Rose in the Fist, the last one of them was not addressed by the public channel Rai 2. We anticipated those problems to a delegation of the OSCE, which we persuaded to monitor the elections, but only a handful of representatives were dispatched to Italy. We will follow up to that, and will keep you informed of the developments. Throughout the last couple of weeks, Berlusconi ran a very aggressive campaign and was able to mobilize his base portraying the center left as a tax and spend coalition apparently convincing the middle class to support him, especially in the north of the country where he won almost everywhere, promising to cut taxes and to oppose State meddling in the economy in counter-tendency of his last five years! In any event, our 2.6%, around 1 million votes, was instrumental in securing Prodi's victory. The Rose in the Fist will have a Parliamentary Group at the Chamber of Deputies with 18 MPs but no Senators. Italy now needs to elect a new President of the Republic, therefore, even if Romano Prodi has started to work on his team, the new Government will be able to swear in only mid May, and we do not know yet what role The rose inthe fist will be asked to play in the new governement.

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