Center-Left Coalition Projected to Win Narrowly in Italian Vote

A center-left coalition headed by former Communists seemed poised to take power here today, but its projected victory in Sunday’s national elections may prove too narrow to ensure any quick end to Italy’s prolonged political stalemate.

The center-left alliance’s projected lead over a center-right coalition would give it a plurality in the two houses of Parliament. But it will not be clear until all the votes are counted later today whether it has majority control in either house.

In a country seeking a strong government committed to reform, the absence of a majority could produce one more weak coalition government--No. 55 since World War II.

The center-left Olive Tree alliance led in the Senate, which has 315 elected seats, with 44.3% to the center-right’s 37.6%, with nearly three-quarters of the vote counted, Associated Press reported. Projections for the 630-member Chamber of Deputies, where vote-counting was going more slowly, gave the center-left 45.1% and the center-right 42.8%. The margin of error is 3 percentage points, according to Abacus, which did the projections for Italian television.

Even if it proves indecisive, Sunday’s vote was historic. For 50 years, the former Communists--now known as the Party of the Democratic Left, a respectable social democratic member of the European left--were Italy’s second-largest party but never shared in national power.

On Sunday, the former Communists formed the heart of the widespreading Olive Tree alliance. The coalition is nominally led by moderate economist Romano Prodi, its candidate for prime minister, and includes Lamberto Dini, a former member of the Central Bank and the current caretaker prime minister.

“Even on the basis of early numbers, we’ve done better than we hoped--or even dreamed,” Prodi said.

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Other members of the odd-fellows alignment range from the left wing of the defunct Christian Democrats to Greens to old-school Communists who are still assertively Marxist.

The left campaigned together and agreed on a joint list of candidates, but it is not clear how smoothly its components might mesh in government: The old-line Refounded Communism, which counts on about 6% of the national vote, has said it would support an Olive Tree government on a vote-by-vote basis without joining it.

“I think it’s evident that the [Olive Tree] has won a significant victory,” said Democratic Left leader Massimo D’Alema, a 47-year-old professional politician who went to Soviet summer camps as a fervent Young Communist. “Italy has said no to the right. We’ll count the seats tomorrow.”

Sunday’s projections were a bitter blow to former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire leader of the center-right Freedom Alliance. Within the coalition, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy) party was narrowly outdistancing ally Gianfranco Fini of the National Alliance, which has neo-fascist roots. Fini, 44, is canny, cautious, patient and convinced that one day he will lead Italy.

The regionalist Northern League led by maverick Umberto Bossi, whose defection from the center-right alliance in 1994 brought Berlusconi down, won a projected 9% Sunday, and another possible spoiler’s role.

The election was the third in four years, one more attempt by voters to elect a government to achieve structural reforms that major parties support but have been unable to enact.

Both coalitions promised to privatize state industries, reduce the deficit and the national debt, and join in European monetary union.

They also called for a constitutional overhaul to change both the way governments are elected and the relationship of powers within them. For the first time, there is a national groundswell for the direct election of a president and a strong executive branch.

With only narrow substantive differences between the programs of the two coalitions, the search was for a leader. The prime minister was not being elected as such, but the choice was between two very different men.

On the right is Berlusconi, 59--a polished, expensively suntanned entrepreneur, a trademark of the can-do Italian private sector. He came on like gangbusters in his political debut in 1994 and served a lackluster and acrimonious seven months before being toppled by the internal divisions in his coalition. Berlusconi faces trial on charges that one of his companies--they range from television stations to a championship soccer team--bribed tax inspectors, but he remains the darling of the right.

On the left is Prodi, 56--an academician from Bologna who once ran one of Italy’s largest state enterprises. Prodi has never been accused of being telegenic and is a sometimes boring speaker. But he managed to assemble the entire strong-willed and fractious left and centrist allies under one roof.

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On the surface, the Berlusconi-Prodi confrontation was proof positive that everything is different in Italian politics since the end of the Cold War, plus a 4-year-old corruption scandal that destroyed parties that had run the country for more than four decades.

But Prodi and Berlusconi were the chosen candidates of coalitions where muscle rippled beneath the surface, with fascist heir Fini on the right and former Communist D’Alema on the left.

Fini and D’Alema’s allies are convinced of the democratic credentials of both. But not their enemies. And perhaps not centrist voters chary of any vestige of yesterday’s extremisms. Thus the left put forth Prodi, and the right Berlusconi, instead of their coalition partners.