Newsmaker

Prodi claims Italy election win amid dispute

(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-04-11 13:56

ROME - Centre-left leader Romano Prodi claimed a knife-edge victory in Italy's general election on Tuesday, but Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's allies disputed the result and demanded a review of the count.

"We have won ... from today we turn a page," Prodi told a rally in a Rome square about 12 hours after the polls closed.

"The country is divided ... it was a very difficult battle, until the last minute we were on the edge of the razor but in the end victory arrived," said Prodi, the former European Commission president.

Italy's opposition leader Romano Prodi holds his grand daughter Chiara, 3, wearing a t-shirt that reads "Grandfather for President" during a rally by his centre-left coalition in central Rome April 11, 2006. [Reuters]

Official data showed that in the lower house Chamber of Deputies Prodi's centre-left had taken about 49.80 percent of the vote compared with 49.73 percent for Berlusconi. Prodi's winning margin was around 25,000 votes, a tiny fraction of Italy's 47 million eligible electors.

"Divided country", "Neck-and-Neck" and "Split down the Middle" were the headlines used in most mainstream newspapers to describe the vote, the closest election in modern history.

The close result revealed deep splits at the heart of Italian society and raised doubts over whether the country could be governed effectively.

Under Italy's new electoral system, the ballot winners are automatically granted 340 of the lower house's 630 seats no matter how small their margin of victory in the popular vote, with the runners up getting some 277 seats.

Centre-right politicians said the vote was too close, with up to a half a million spoilt and annulled ballots. Counting for the upper house Senate was also not yet complete, they said.

DISPUTE

"Neither side reached 50 percent (in the lower house) and the margin is under 25,000 votes. Such a tiny difference necessitates a scrupulous checking of the counting and tally sheets ...," Paolo Bonauiti, Berlusconi's right-hand man, told reporters in the early morning hours.

A re-evaluation of the spoilt ballots could unleash political chaos in Italy, evoking the 2000 U.S. presidential election, which ended in a bitter recount battle in Florida.

Berlusconi himself has not yet commented on the results.

Near-final results gave Berlusconi a one seat majority in the Senate. But the centre-left alliance projected that it was on course to have at least a one-seat majority in the Senate after the counting of about a million votes from Italians abroad was completed later in the day.

Italians abroad will assign six Senate seats and the centre-left was ahead in that counting.

If confirmed, such a slim majority for the centre-left alliance in the Senate would prove extremely hard to manage and could usher in chronic political instability in a country where governments have an average life span of one year.

Italy's two houses of parliament duplicate each other's functions and a government needs the support of both to take office and to pass laws.

Prodi's centre-left bloc, which stretches from Roman Catholic centrists to committed communists, had expected a comfortable victory in the election, tapping into voter unhappiness over the stagnant economy and rising cost of living.

Exit polls on Monday suggested Prodi had secured a clear win, but as the count progressed, Berlusconi closed the gap.

Berlusconi had trailed in the opinion polls for two years, but he fought an abrasive campaign, wrong-footing Prodi in the final week by promising to abolish an unpopular property tax.

If Prodi does take office, he will inherit the task of cutting the world's third largest national debt pile while trying to breathe new life into an economy that grew an average of 0.6 percent a year under Berlusconi.

He has pledged to cut labour taxes, provide bigger handouts for families with children, reintroduce an inheritance tax, scrap plans to raise the age of retirement to 60 and launch a crackdown on tax evasion.

The next government is not expected to take office for at least a month, with Berlusconi set to stay on in a caretaker capacity until parliament nominates a successor to President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, whose mandate expires in May.

The president must name the new prime minister and Ciampi says he wants to leave the task to his successor.