/UPDATE*/ELECTIONS-ITALY: High Turnout on First Day of Voting

By Sabina Zaccaro Reprint | | Print |

Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Apr 9 2006 (IPS) - The first day of Italy’s two-day voting period came to a close Sunday evening with a healthy voter turnout – on top of the positive response from the newly eligible Italian voters abroad – to decide who is to govern the country for the next five years.

Some 47 million Italians are on the voter rolls for the 60,798 voting stations across the country, which were open from 8am to 10pm Sunday, and will be open from 7am to 3pm on Monday, Apr. 10.

For the first time ever, some 2.6 million Italians citizens living abroad are eligible to vote in a general election. Their postal votes will decide the political colour of six of the Senate’s 315 members and 12 of the 360 members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said Saturday that 1.1 million, or 42 percent, of eligible Italian voters living abroad had cast ballots. The highest participation was in Latin America (51.8 percent of those eligible), where voters are electing three deputies and two senators back home. However, the results will not be released until after the voting is completed in Italy.

The latest opinion poll, conducted on Mar. 24, before a two-week blackout on election opinion surveys took effect, gave the centre-left coalition headed by Romano Prodi a 3.5 to 5.0 percentage point advantage over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition.

The first day of the elections ended with high turnout. By 10pm Sunday, 66.5 percent of the electorate had voted. In the last elections, in 2001, the final turnout was 81.4 percent, but it was a one-day voting period.

The electoral campaign officially ended Friday, the last day allowed before the Sunday-Monday voting.

Both coalitions encompass truly diversified parties. Prodi’s Union ranges from pro-Vatican moderates to unreformed Communists. Berlusconi’s House of Freedom coalition includes Christian Democrats, former neo-fascists and an anti-immigrant party.

Some complained that personal bickering between the two leaders prevented any serious discussion of issues during the electoral campaign. “Prodi and Berlusconi have not been able to tell us about their platforms and how they will face the country’s problems,” Mauro Nobile, a 41-year-old professional, told IPS as he left a polling station in Rome.

Towards the end of a particularly aggressive campaign, the prime minister tried to close the gap that opinion polls showed between his conservative bloc and the opposition, announcing his intention to eliminate a property tax on primary homes, and to remove a tax on garbage collection, which together represent 75 percent of municipal revenues.

Both candidates have tried to draw in the undecided voters, estimated to be a double-digit percentage and a slice of the electorate crucial for deciding a close election.

Results will depend to some degree on voter turnout and on the impact of a new proportional representation system devised by Berlusconi’s government for this election. Pundits say a higher turnout would increase the prime minister’s chance of re-election. In Italy’s May 2001 elections, when turnout was 81.2 percent, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party swept to victory as the majority party with 29.4 percent of the vote.

A large proportion of the undecided are reportedly housewives, a group that flocked to vote for Berlusconi five years ago but who appear to be less enthusiastic this time around, even if not completely trusting Prodi’s centre-left alternative.

“If by chance too many people stay home, there could be the possibility… of a victory by the left”, the prime minister said in a radio interview on Friday. According to his coalition, a turnout of more than 80 percent would give him the win.

Some in the opposition see linking a Berlosconi win to high turnout as wishful thinking and suggest that it is a ready-made excuse issued beforehand in case of defeat.

Lapo Pistelli, foreign policy coordinator for the centre-left Margherita party, a pillar of Prodi’s Union coalition, told IPS in a telephone interview that “a higher turnout would affect results for sure, but it’s difficult to guess in favour of which side.”

“As democrats, we do hope to record the highest possible turnout, which would mean that people understand the value of their vote and care about their country,” he said.

This is not surprising for a coalition that went through a successful lesson in democracy last October, when holding the first “primary” elections ever in Italy to choose the candidate to lead the centre-left platform. With an extraordinary turnout of more than four million participants – significantly exceeding expectations – Romano Prodi was elected with 74 percent of votes.

According to Pistelli, “Most of those who decided not to vote are distancing themselves from the attitude of such a vitriolic campaign, rather than from politics itself.”

Whoever wins will inherit the unenviable task of cutting the world’s third-largest national debt, while trying to breathe new life into a struggling economy that grew an average of just 0.6 percent a year under the current government.

Even though 52 percent of the Italian electorate is women, their political representation is at stake in this election and an acute gender imbalance persists.

Both the ruling coalition and the opposition have presented a meagre list of female candidates, reflecting a country with the lowest percentage of female representatives in Europe, ahead only of Lithuania and Greece.

In the last legislature, women held just 11.5 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 8.1 percent in the Senate; and just two of the outgoing Cabinet’s 24 ministers are women.

Although women have begun to rise to top political positions in several countries – like Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet and her first-ever Latin American Cabinet with an equal number of men and women, Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia – the Italian political system still lacks significant female presence and support.

“The real challenge is to change the rules of what is still a man’s game, as power is always negotiated among the usual group of men. In our country there’s still no room for new entries, like women and immigrants,” said Emma Bonino in a recent interview. She is a former European commissioner and one of two leaders of the Radical Party La Rosa nel Pugno, which is running as part of the centre-left coalition in this election.

The Italian political system remains strongly conservative and controlled by male-dominated parties. This is even more explicit towards the right end of the political spectrum. Centre-left parties are in general more sensitive towards gender issues, as demonstrated by the 30 percent female candidates for the Union coalition. Prodi promises to affirm women’s equality in politics and society.

During a televised debate last month, the prime minister said his centre-right coalition had few women candidates because it was “not easy to find someone who wants to leave work and family and spend five days a week in Rome… They prefer to dedicate themselves to their husbands and children,” he concluded.

However, in an attempt to recover some ground in the last days of the election campaign, he promised to appoint eight female ministers and a woman as deputy-prime minister if he is re-elected.

Francesca Barbieri, 53, a mathematics teacher in a secondary school in Rome, told IPS that she would like to see more women sitting in the Parliament. “Our political system still considers us a minority group,” she said after casting her vote. “The small number of women could be the reason why, after so many years of political struggle, the government moves again to limit abortion and civil union. That’s why I just voted for the centre-left, a more open-minded coalition.”

Prodi countered that, if elected, his coalition would establish quotas ensuring a certain percentage of female candidates: “My own experience as European Union president says that this is the only way to reach the right gender equation in Parliament.”

According to a recent survey commissioned by the daily newspaper La Repubblica, 41 percent of female voters think that Italian women lack concrete means to combine politics, job and family in their lives. The survey paints a picture of one of the most sexist countries in Europe.

Under the existing electoral system and the current candidate lists, regardless of who wins the elections, the Italian Parliament will have a maximum of just 15 percent women.

(*The voter turnout figures in paragraph 6 have been corrected and updated.)