Posted on 04/15/2006 6:15:53 AM PDT by FairOpinion
Italo-Australians may have helped topple Silvio Berlusconi's government, Natasha Bita reports from Rome.
CELEBRATING his election to the Italian Senate this week, Melbourne journalist Nino Randazzo fielded a phone call from party headquarters in Rome, worried whether he could be counted to support the centre-left Unione, the winner by a very small margin in a disputed tally. "Can we count on you?" the Italian politician grilled him. "Are you sure you will remain faithful to your commitment to support the Unione?"
Randazzo was appalled. "I took it as an offence," he tells Inquirer. "I told him that Italians living overseas are a different breed from certain Italian politicians. There is not a chance in the world we overseas electors would cross the floor. We have given our word of honour."
One of six expatriate Italians voted into the Italian Senate in this week's photo-finish election under new rules creating expatriate seats, Randazzo's support for the Unione coalition is crucial to its slippery grip on the upper house.
As centre-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi clings to power pending a recount of disputed ballot papers, Unione leader Romano Prodi, a former prime minister, has Italo-Australian voters to thank for his knife-edge win.
Before the votes of expatriate Italians were counted on Tuesday, Berlusconi looked to have secured a one-seat majority in the Senate, which would have allowed him to force a new election if Unione gained the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.
Then, to his fury, the votes of immigrant Italians swung the election outcome the other way. Four of the six expatriate Senate seats (Randazzo's included) and seven of the 12 expatriate lower house seats (including one held by Melbourne social worker Marco Fedi) went to the Unione. This was enough to give Prodi control of the lower house and a two-seat margin in the Senate over Berlusconi's Casa delle Liberta (House of Freedoms) coalition, led by Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia (Go Italy).
Perhaps tired of his bullying and buffoonery, most Italians voted to boot Berlusconi out of office on Monday. But the billionaire media tycoon, who has led Italy's longest serving post-war government, is refusing to concede defeat until the court of appeal has counted 43,000 disputed voting papers. He even declared the vote had been rigged.
"The election result has to change because there was widespread fraud," he complained on Wednesday. "There are innumerable irregularities in the voting."
The recount is unlikely to affect the outcome, preliminary results showed yesterday, with disputed votes being divided equally among the parties. Berlusconi proposed on Thursday to introduce an ad hoc law that would permit the recount of another two million spoiled ballot papers, an idea shot down by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who said he would block it.
Prodi, an economics professor who finished a five-year term as European Commission president last year, is set to be sworn in as prime minister next month. "We have won," he declared. "Berlusconi has to go home now."
A constitutional quirk means Prodi will have to wait weeks for his prize. Ciampi is due to retire on May 18 and wants his successor to appoint the new prime minister. The new parliament will open on April 28 and must vote for a new Italian president by May 13.
Prodi beat Berlusconi once before, a decade ago, but his term lasted only 18 months, when the reformed Communist Party withdrew its support and toppled the government. This time, Prodi is planning to meld his 12-party coalition into a single Democratic Party within a year. Refusing to guarantee ministries to the party leaders, he is insisting that he will hand-pick his cabinet, appointing women to one-third of the posts.
Controlling a broad-spectrum coalition of interests that range from the Catholic-leaning Democrats of the Left, through to the Greens, the radicals and the communists will be a challenge for Prodi.
His most urgent challenge is to kick-start the economy, which stalled at zero-growth last year. Berlusconi created a million jobs by freeing up the labour market and making it easier for employers to hire workers on short-term contracts. One of Prodi's most popular promises is to create more secure, permanent full-time jobs, a more daunting task.
Most worryingly for Berlusconi is Prodi's plan - "not a vendetta," Prodi insists - to introduce a conflict-of-interest law that would force Italy's richest man to choose between politics and his vast business interests. Berlusconi is reportedly planning to hand control of his media empire to his five children, but Prodi's law would force him to put his holdings into a blind trust instead.
Prodi plans to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq by the year's end - a policy similar to Berlusconi's - and to take a more European approach to policy-making - not good news for George W. Bush. The leaders of France, Spain, Germany and the European Union have already called to congratulate Prodi, but two of Berlusconi's closest allies - the US and Britain - seem to be waiting for their old amico to concede defeat. Prodi holds a comfortable majority in the lower house, thanks to new electoral laws that Berlusconi's government rammed through the parliament in December.
The laws, attacked at the time by the Centre-Left as made to measure for Berlusconi, automatically give bonus seats to the side with the most votes so the winner can govern with stability.
Italy has changed governments 57 times in the past 57 years, not always after new elections, due to a proliferation of small parties that routinely topple governments by switching sides. Despite winning by fewer than 25,000 votes out of the 38million cast - a margin of less than 0.1per cent - Prodi's Unione now enjoys 348 seats in the Camera of Deputies, compared with Berlusconi's 281.
The new electoral laws also changed the way Italians vote. The old system let voters choose between regional candidates who fought on local issues, an advantage to the Left due to its stronger grassroots campaigning.
The new proportional system lets voters choose a political party rather than a candidate, better suited to Berlusconi's presidential-style campaign.
"The law was tailor-made for Berlusconi, but it came back to bite him," says Berlusconi biographer Paul Ginsborg, a professor of history at the University of Florence. "Berlusconi had everything to gain by the new laws, so the result is quite a heroic effort by the Left. But the majority in the Senate is much too narrow for comfort."
Technically, Prodi will govern in a hung Senate. Seven senators for life - appointed, not elected, for their contribution to Italy - and an independent elected from Argentina who has pledged to support the majority, will hold the balance of power. The senators for life include Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986, and seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, who was cleared on appeal in 2003 of having ordered a mafia hit on a journalist killed in 1979.
Retired presidents of the Italian republic are automatically made senators for life. One of them, Francesco Cossiga, says he will not take part in any votes of confidence and plans to introduce legislation stripping the senators of their right to vote. The precarious outcome puts the six expatriate senators - elected from the diaspora of four million Italians living overseas - in a powerful position to extract concessions from parties desperate to keep them in line.
In Australia, Randazzo and Fedi have a wish list that includes restoring Italian citizenship to Italo-Australians, improving consular services, promoting Italian language and culture, an amnesty on the repayment of Italian pensions overpaid due to miscalculations by the Italian pension service and Italian government assistance for elderly Italians living overseas.
"The remittance of Italian migrants was the lifeline for entire regions of Italy after World War II," says Randazzo, 73, a Sicilian migrant. "Yet there are very few nursing homes for Italian-speaking people in Australia. We need to have Italians in nursing homes where there are Italian-speaking nurses and doctors. And attention needs to be given to their eating habits. You could not give an elderly Italian an ordinary big steak."
Fedi, 48, who emigrated from the Marches region of northern Italy in 1983, wants the expatriate MPs to meet Prodi and present an agenda with "some issues that should be dealt with immediately".
But Randazzo rules out playing political hard ball to win government support for expatriate demands in return for his loyalty on other votes. "I would never use that kind of blackmail," he says. "I know the program of the Unione is wide enough to contain a response to these demands. I'm quite happy to contribute all I can to make sure the Prodi government lasts for the next five years."
Ironically, it was Berlusconi's government that gave Italians living overseas the right to vote.
"That was a boomerang for him," says Randazzo, an author and playwright who for the past 28 years has edited Australia's Italian-language newspaper Il Globo. "They had an idea that all Italians living overseas are right-wing. They have no idea how well-informed Italians in Australia are. They have two Italian-language newspapers, a 24-hour radio station, Rete Italia, covering the whole of the country, access to Italian TV through RAI International and Italian newspapers online."
The expatriate seats are divided globally. Fedi and Randazzo represent the world's biggest electorate, spanning Oceania, Asia, Africa and Antarctica. Australia hosts about two-thirds of the region's 161,022 qualified expatriate voters. Of these, only 40 per cent bothered to vote in the Italian election and, of those, 10,000 were declared invalid. In the end, the votes of 30,000 Italo-Australians have helped change the course of Italian politics. "The outcome was really unexpected," says the vice-consul of the Italian embassy in Australia, Roberto Mengoni. "You [Australians] should be proud you have a direct influence on Italian politics now."
Randazzo received 52 per cent of the Senate votes cast from Australia. His nearest rival, Forza Italia's Luigi Casagrande, a Brisbane engineer, polled 33 per cent. In the Deputies, Fedi snared 56 per cent of the vote, against 35 per cent taken by Forza Italia's Teresa Restifa, a Sydney shopping centre developer.
While the left-wing candidates ran on a single ticket for the Unione, the conservative vote was split between five parties, including one set up in the name of Italy's minister for expatriates, Mirko Tremaglia. In Australia, more people voted for the Unione than for all the conservative parties put together. But when votes are added from Africa and Asia, Berlusconi's team would have beaten the Unione had it run on a single ticket.
The real source: the KGB, which has long been rumored to have used Prodi as its point man in Italy.
Um... the United States would be one of them. In fact, I don't know of any country that doesn't.
Now - the term expatriates - are we using the term to describe citizens who live abroad, or people who have moved to another country and taken up citizenship fo that country...??
The first - I can understand their vote. The second - makes no sense at all. Living abroad doesn't mean they have given up citizenship.
Sure would make it easier if the supposed conservative party here in the US offered a truly good candidate.... Alas, we are stuck with Liberal-lite far too often.
ITALY ELECTIONS: Prodi won thanks to Muslim vote, Islamic group says
(Islamist-Communist alliance)
AKI | 2006 Apr 11
Posted on 04/12/2006 5:55:55 AM EDT by Wiz
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