SILVIO BERLUSCONI appeared last night to have defied his critics and avoided a bloody nose in Italian regional elections that he and his opponents had promoted as a referendum on his right-wing government. But a record low turnout signalled an unprecedented level of disillusionment across the country.
Though the economy is deep in crisis, the main issues in the campaign were neither employment nor exports, but the prime minister’s alleged efforts to gag the media, his eternal problems with the courts and the regularity or otherwise of his party’s list of candidates in the key region of Lazio, around Rome.
The race in Lazio was too close to call, but in the 12 other regions at stake early projections showed Mr Berlusconi’s Freedom People movement taking five and the left and centre-left opposition seven.
That would represent a numeric defeat. But as 11 of the regions involved in the vote had been run by the centre-left, it would be a distinctly qualified setback.
It looked as if the biggest fly in Mr Berlusconi’s ointment would be not the advance of the opposition, but rather that of his troublesome allies in the populist and xenophobic Northern League.
More than 41 million Italians were eligible to vote in two days of balloting that began on Sunday. Elections were held to decide the governors and assemblies of 13 of the country’s 20 regions, the heads of four provinces and the mayors in almost 500 towns.
Yet despite the importance attached to the ballot by politicians of all parties, only 65 per cent of the electorate voted – 7 per cent less than during the same elections in 2005.
The interior minister, Roberto Maroni of the Northern League, admitted it was “a sign of disaffection on the part of members of the public” in a country that once boasted the highest turnouts in Europe.
The prime minister and his followers had hoped for a result that would mean they could put behind them the controversies of last year, when Mr Berlusconi was at the centre of a string of sex scandals. But their party got off to a disastrous start when its representatives in super-marginal Lazio failed to meet the deadline for presenting the slate of candidates.
In the final phase of the campaign Mr Berlusconi threw himself into the fray, and his popularity with a substantial segment of the electorate may have once again made the difference.
In Lazio the contest was between the former EU commissioner Emma Bonino and a trade unionist from the labour movement associated with Italy’s former neo-fascists. Another closely fought battle was in Venice, where one of Mr Berlusconi’s ministers, Renato Brunetta, was running for mayor on a platform of drastic modernisation of the city’s economy. – (Guardian service)