Berlusconi leads battle for Italy top office
Foreign Desk Report

ROME—Conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi was locked in a close battle for power with his main rival Walter Veltroni after Italy’s parliamentary election, exit polls showed Monday.
The exit polls released on Sky TV showed Berlusconi’s center-right coalition leading with 42 percent in the lower house, compared with 40 percent for Veltroni, the center-left leader. But that lead was within the 2-percentage point margin of error.
In the Senate, Berlusconi was leading 42.5 percent compared with Veltroni’s 39.5 percent. Senate seats, though, are apportioned according to region and are not based on national results reflected in the exit polls. Under Italy’s system, premiers must have control of both houses to govern.
Italian exit polls have often proved unreliable in past elections, including two years ago when they showed Romano Prodi with a 5-point lead. He eventually won by just 24,000 votes. The voting Sunday and Monday came amid a widespread sense of national decline and an economic downturn.
Berlusconi, 71 and vying for his third term as premier, has blamed the outgoing center-left government for the country’s troubles. Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, is almost 20 years younger and has promised deep reform and an ideology-free approach to tackle the country’s problems.
Berlusconi entered the race as the front-runner, capitalizing on the unpopularity of the outgoing government of Prodi, whose early collapse forced the vote three years ahead of schedule.
But Veltroni appeared to have narrowed the gap, according to polls released before a pre-election ban on publishing polls took effect.
Whoever wins will face Italy’s perpetual dilemma — improving the economy, the world’s seventh largest. It has underperformed the rest of the euro zone for years and the International Monetary Fund forecasts growth of 0.3 percent this year, compared with a 1.4 percent average growth for the 15-country euro area.
Signs of decline are abound, from piles of trash in Naples, to a buffalo mozzarella heath scare that has hurt exports and hit one of the country’s culinary treasures, to the faltering sale of the state airline Alitalia.
And Italians increasingly blame the governing class — not just one political force or another — for the failure to solve the nation’s problems. The elections decide 945 parliamentary seats, 630 of those in the lower house.
Under Italy’s much-criticized election law, a party only needs a relative majority in the lower house — even just a 1-vote lead — to win bonus seats securing full control of the chamber.
The picture in the Senate will not become clear until results are shown from Italy’s 20 regions, as seats are apportioned according to region and not based on national results reflected in the exit polls.