ROME: The voters most likely to upset Italy’s close parliamentary election next week are not in Rome, Florence or Milan. In fact, they’re not even in Italy.
Italy’s swing state, pundits say, is abroad in fledgling, two-year-old electoral districts like North America and South America where expatriates elect their own representatives to parliament.
The electoral oddity started two years ago, empowering a small, unpredictable group of voters who control a crucial block of six senate seats. These will be key in the April 13-14 ballot in which polls show no clear frontrunner for control of the senate.“It’s a big unknown factor,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political analyst in Rome.
“It’s hard to predict where these voters are going to go. They have very different interests and very different political perspectives as well.”
In the last election, in 2006, the expatriates confounded analysts by voting against incumbent Silvio Berlusconi and helping deliver a razor-edge victory to Romano Prodi.
Analysts say Berlusconi, the poll favourite this time, is redoubling efforts to reach the roughly 3 million expatriates registered to vote more voters than in Rome.
ELECTIONS, AGAIN?: Maybe nobody knows the challenges of reaching foreign voters better than Renato Turano, an Italian senator who runs a bakery in the Chicago area. Turano, a candidate for the Democratic Party, is quietly running for re-election in the shadows of a thundering US presidential campaign.
He won his first five-year term in the senate in 2006 only to see the centre-left government collapse in January, forcing early elections a full three years ahead of schedule.
While political instability is old-hat in Italy, home to 61 governments since World War Two, snap elections are not easily digested in the United States. Turano says he has gotten plenty of bewildered looks from confused North American voters.
“Many of them are going: ‘But you just got elected. Why are you running again?’ So, you have to explain that,” said Turano, whose family left Italy for a new life in Chicago in 1950.
“And many of them understand. But a lot of them don’t.”
In Buenos Aires, 81-year-old incumbent senator Luigi Pallaro says he has been racing from airport to airport to squeeze in campaign visits to places as distant as Bogota, Sao Paulo, Santiago and Caracas all part of his South America district.
“I’ll go to all the countries,” Pallaro insisted.
Like Turano, Pallaro says he has rarely seen his constituents since being elected, as the prime minister’s two-seat majority in the senate means the expatriate senator votes are crucial for keeping Prodi in power.
“I have been a bit of a prisoner in Italy, because my vote was always fundamental to sustain the government,” said Pallaro, an independent who says he’ll align with anyone who helps his expatriate community.
Critics say the lack of contact with voters is one good reason to do away with expatriate lawmakers altogether.
Expatriates also don’t pay taxes, and could be more concerned with Italy’s image abroad than its real problems back home.
MAFIA’S LONG REACH: Small businessman Renato Venier, an expatriate living in Germany, is one voter worried about Italy’s image overseas.
He owns an ice-cream shop in Duisburg, just up the street from a pizzeria that made world headlines last year after a mafia shooting left six people dead. Police believe the killings were ordered by a crime boss in southern Italy.
Venier is voting for Berlusconi, despite doubts the conservative politician or his rival Walter Veltroni can crack down on organised crime.
Instead, Venier says he has more confidence in the business sensitivities of Berlusconi, a billionaire media mogul and one of Italy’s richest men.
“I don’t believe that either political group would be able to tackle the mafia,” said Venier, who has lived in Germany for 28 years. “It operates above politics and the rule of law. There is too much money and power involved.”
Fears of irregularities in the foreign vote, in Germany and elsewhere, are already starting to make headlines in Italy. One report cited the sale of ballots in Cologne for 25 euros each, a claim Italy’s Interior Ministry says it is investigating.
Berlusconi’s allies are already predicting voter fraud abroad, in what critics suspect is a tactical move to help them later challenge the polls in the event of defeat.
“Later on, whether there is voter fraud or not, they’re going to say ‘See, I told you so’,” said Turano.—Reuters
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