Italy's regional elections

Berlusconi's bounce

A surprisingly good result for Italy's prime minister

REGIONAL elections on March 28th-29th made several things clear about today’s Italy. The first was that it is not France. Defying predictions, the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, did not get a trouncing at the polls of the kind President Nicolas Sarkozy suffered recently.

Of the 13 regions at stake, Mr Berlusconi’s conservative People of Freedom (PdL) movement took six, regaining four of them from the left. This was a strong performance for the prime minister. The opposition had everything in its favour: a string of sex scandals involving Mr Berlusconi last year; a display, in late February, of extraordinary ineptitude by the PdL when it failed to deliver its list of candidates on time in Lazio, the region that includes Rome, and an economic crisis that last year slashed GDP by 5.1% and destroyed more than 400,000 jobs. One poll conducted two weeks before the election had predicted the left holding all but one of the 11 regions that it won in 2005.

The Democratic Party (PD), Italy’s biggest opposition group, did at least narrow the gap with the PdL. Partial results suggested the distance between the parties could be as little as 1%, compared with more than 4% at the 2008 general election. And the left could claim that its vote was eroded in at least one marginal region by the Five-Star Movement, a new outfit led by Beppe Grillo, an anti-Berlusconi comedian and blogger. Mr Grillo’s party had an impressive first outing, winning almost 7% in the left’s heartland of Emilia-Romagna.

Yet this was a disappointing result for the left. It lost four of its 11 governorships, and might well have lost another, Puglia, had the right there held together. In Campania, the region around Naples, the opposition’s share of the vote plunged from 62% to 43%—a damning judgment on ten years of left-wing administration. The left also failed to hold Lazio, despite fielding a strong candidate: Emma Bonino, a former European commissioner.

What went wrong? The mainstream opposition is clearly still incapable of capitalising on the dissatisfaction felt towards the government by many parts of the electorate, particularly the young. Instead of supporting the PD or the smaller, feistier Italy of Principles (IDV) movement, many voters stayed at home. Only 64% bothered to vote, almost 8% fewer than five years ago. And contrary to expectations, the right was not the only victim of the low turnout.

The other explanation for the turnaround is even more disquieting for the left. Two weeks before voting, Mr Berlusconi took to the hustings, and his personal charisma may have tilted the balance. The prime minister was not slow to draw conclusions, reportedly telling aides that in Lazio he had wrought a “sort of miracle”.

But there is a cloud on Mr Berlusconi's horizon: the success of his ally, Umberto Bossi, whose populist, xenophobic Northern League was the one undisputed victor of these elections. The party won 13% of the vote, up from 8% at the general election, and took the governorships of two northern regions, Veneto and Piedmont. Mr Bossi promptly announced he would press for greater financial autonomy for the north as the price of his continued support. This is unlikely to be the last demand he will make of the prime minister.

As for Mr Berlusconi, he will doubtless see the result as a mandate for his continued attempts to curb the criminal prosecutors who have pursued him since before he entered politics 16 years ago. He may also view the outcome as legitimising his aspiration to a presidential style of government. How far he gets down either of these roads may now depend less on the opposition than on Mr Bossi.