A Razor-thin Victory

A surprisingly close election. Prodi’s center-left coalition- the Unione- won but in the Chamber only 24.755 votes have separated the winning coalition from Berlusconi’s Casa delle Libertà (Cdl). However, thanks to the new electoral system, the Unione enjoys a substantial majority of seats. In the Senate it is actually Berlusconi’s coalition that got a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the ‘domestic’ seats but, thanks to the seats allocated to the Italian residents abroad, Prodi ended up with a razor-thin majority of 2 seats. This is, in a nutshell, the outcome of the most contested election in recent Italian history. An unexpected result. Indeed the widespread expectation was that the Unione would win with a larger margin. Most of the polls had indicated a consistently favorable trend in favor of the Unione up to the last few days before the vote. What happened in the ballot box on April 9 and 10th it is still an enigma. In this article we will try to give a preliminary explanation, analyzing the new electoral systems, the ways parties and coalitions decided to compete, the results of the vote, the reasons behind this result, and finally the evolution of the party system