The result of the elections for representatives and senators in Italy disclosed the country’s political division. The dispute was waged between two party blocs: the center right coalition, “Casa delle Libertà” (House of Liberties) led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the center left coalition, “L’Unità” (Unity), headed by former prime minister Romano Prodi, who won by a narrow margin of 25 thousand votes (0.1%), not including votes from outside the Italian territory.

The result of the elections for representatives and senators in Italy disclosed the country’s political division. The dispute was waged between two party blocs: the center right coalition, “Casa delle Libertà” (House of Liberties) led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the center left coalition, “L’Unità” (Unity), headed by former prime minister Romano Prodi, who won by a narrow margin of 25 thousand votes (0.1%), not including votes from outside the Italian territory.

This small margin was not at all anticipated given the institutional support Prodi had from the European public opinion, as well as from Italian entrepreneurs and the middle class. Italy’s poor economic performance, the Italian participation in the war in Iraq and Berlusconi’s authoritarian style pointed to Prodi as the candidate of the common sense.

He will, however, have the majority in both legislative houses due to the electoral reform promoted by the outgoing government, which altered the electoral criterion to secure a broader majority to the winning party even if the party does not attain 50% plus 1 of the votes, a minimum of 340 seats in the House of Representatives, and also to allow Italians residing abroad to vote for the first time. The reasoning for the second reform was an anticipated conservatism of the foreign vote, an outcome which did not prove to be true. The reform obviously aimed at benefiting the right when elections occurred but the strategy backfired.

The House’s composition assured Prodi 348 representatives and 281 to Berlusconi, while in the Senate each bloc obtained 158 and 156 seats, respectively. It was the votes cast by Italians residing abroad which assured a majority in the Senate for the Prodi coalition, with “L’Unità” electing four senators out of five possible.

Of note was the virulence and unscrupulousness of the Berlusconi campaign, who repeatedly scorned the law by using his own communications network, Italy’s largest, in his favor. On the eve of the election he gave an interview to one of his own TV channels, infringing the law, an opportunity his opponent was not given.

He resorted to foul language when referring to the people who voted for the opposition, attacked the presence of the “Refundazione Comunista” in Prodi’s coalition and even came to say that Chinese communists in the Mao Zedong era “cooked babies to make manure”. The final act was to classify the election as fraudulent and ask for a vote recount, as if the government itself did not control the process. The recount was carried out and the result confirmed.

In the meantime, the recount was the formal argument chosen by the governments of the US and Great Britain to abstain from acknowledging the result in the days ensuing the election. The more likely motive for the faux pas was that Prodi had already announced that, as one of his first measures, he would withdraw the approximately 3000 Italian troops based in Iraq today. That does not mean, however, that his will be a progressive administration with regard to the economy, since Italian GDP growth has been feeble and both the budgetary deficit index and the public debt index are above the targets established by EU agreements.

Any comparison with the Brazilian electoral campaign this year, incidentally, is not a mere coincidence. The right’s aggressive posture is not circumscribed to Italy. Governmental elections opposing the right to the center left camp have become increasingly ideological, even when both sides present moderate programs.

In a recent visit to Brazil, Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen, recently reelected for another term, commented that she had begun her electoral campaign with high enough popularity to win in the first round, yet only won in a run-off election because of the intense attacks from the right’s candidate who, besides accusing her of communist/socialist, did not even spare her personal life. According to her, the electoral campaign in neighboring Sweden will track the same path.

Thus, what we are witnessing in Brazil, with the actions staged by the right and the elite against the PT, is not an isolated fact related exclusively to the Brazilian context. Apparently neoliberalism is trying to pursue its more orthodox political and economic agendas.