Italy votes in center-left primary, moves closer to choosing next prime minister

The next general election in Italy, in the spring, will determine who will lead the country as it struggles to recover from recession and high unemployment. On Sunday, Italy held a primary runoff for center-left candidates.

|
Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters
A woman casts her vote at a polling station in Piacenza, northern Italy December 2. The two finalists in a primary to choose the centre-left candidate for prime minister in next year's Italian elections, face judgement day on Sunday in a run-off primary after a bitter campaign.

Italy held a primary runoff Sunday to choose a center-left candidate to run in next year's general election — a man who in a few months could become the EU nation's next premier.

Sunday's runoff pitted veteran Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who campaigned on an Obama-style "Let's change Italy now" mantra that has attracted many disgruntled Italians back to politics.

Nearly all polls projected Bersani, the leader of the main center-left Democratic Party, as winning Sunday's primary. He won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote to Renzi's 35.5 percent.

With Silvio Berlusconi's center-right People of Freedom party lagging in the polls and in chaos over whether the three-time premier will run again, analysts were already discussing the possibility that Bersani could soon become Italy's next premier.

The 2013 general election — expected in March or April — will decide if Italy continues on the same path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis. The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-premier Berlusconi's ability to reign in Italy's public debt and push through structural reforms.

Even if Renzi loses the primary, he will have won a victory of sorts in having changed the Italian left. Renzi's perceived conservative leanings, while alienating the left's hard-core communists, attracted Italians young and old who have grown disenchanted with Italy's political class.

"Even if he loses, as I think he will, he had an important renovation function within the party," Rome resident Pietro Marucci said Sunday as he voted for Renzi.

Renzi's style — moving around Italy in a motor home to meet crowds, addressing supporters in just a shirt and tie, no jacket — attracted quite a following and drew inevitable comparisons to Barack Obama.

But some analysts said he was simply not yet ready for the job of running Italy, and that his relaxed, fresh approach to politics isn't what Italy needs as it navigates through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment and tries to tackle its enormous public debt of €2 trillion ($2.5 trillion).

"Italy certainly badly needs new faces, fresh faces," commentator Massimo Franco said. "But I think that between Renzi and Bersani, the big problem is also experience."

Renzi shot back at that charge during a debate this week, asking Bersani, who has served previously as national transport and industry minister, what he had accomplished in his 2,547 days in government.

Renzi also complained bitterly this week about primary rules that limited voters and his campaign reported alleged voting irregularities on Sunday.

Primary organizers said they were investigating a handful of individual cases but that on the whole voting was proceeding regularly.

Berlusconi had largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year — until recent weeks, when he announced he was thinking about running again, then changed his mind, then threatened to bring down Monti's government, and then went silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray, disrupting its own plans for a primary.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo. Berlusconi's party was in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

It's been quite a turnabout both for Berlusconi's once-dominant movement and the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi's professional and personal failings.

Another unknown is Monti's political future. He has ruled out running for office but has said he would be willing to stay on in some capacity if he could be of service. Some commentators have floated the idea of Monti taking over the largely ceremonial role as Italian president, while others say his talents would put to better use as treasury minister.

Maria Grazia Murru contributed from Rome.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Italy votes in center-left primary, moves closer to choosing next prime minister
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2012/1202/Italy-votes-in-center-left-primary-moves-closer-to-choosing-next-prime-minister
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe