The Italian election of May 2006: Myths and realities

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The figures in Table 1 show a difference, excluding the overseas constituency, of 25,224 votes; 24,755 is the official figure announced by the Court of Cassation after the scrutiny of contested ballots. The difference for the Senate, taken from the figures given at http://www.repubblica.it/speciale/2006/elezioni/senato/index.html, includes the overseas constituency. 2. Recent narrow victories include the Israeli Knesset contest of 1981 (which saw Likud party beat Labour by just 10,405 votes); the US presidential contest of 2000 (decided by just 537 votes in the state of Florida); the German federal election in 2005 (when the CDU/CSU emerged ahead of the SPD by just 1% of the vote). Nor is it unheard of that the party that loses in terms of votes nevertheless wins in terms of seats. If this is what happened in the case of the 2006 Italian Senate contest, then the outcome was one to be placed alongside one US presidential outcome and two British general election outcomes since the war. 3. FI's vote declined from the 29.5% it had won in 2001 to 21.0% while both the UDC and the League saw their vote shares rise (to 5.0% and 5.9% respectively). Meanwhile, the parties of the centre-left made only modest gains to take 46.1% in 2004. 4. Those elections were a disaster for the Cdl: the governing coalition emerged the loser in 12 of the 14 regions where voting took place; took 12,220,858 votes (43.9%) as against the centre left's 14,632,412 (52.6%), and lost control of six of the eight regions it had won in 2000. 5. It won in terms of seats in 1996 only because the centre-right's vote was split.