This is really funny...victims of their own scheming
Al
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Italian Canadian voters pivotal in electing Prodi
Headshot of Doug Saunders
The votes of 40,000 Canadian citizens who qualify as "Italians abroad," some of whom have never set foot in Italy and many of whom don't speak Italian, played a pivotal role in the defeat of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi in Italy's election yesterday, according to poll results released late last night.
For the first time in history, a country's political fate appears to have been determined by citizens of other countries, after Mr. Berlusconi introduced a scheme in 2002 that defines eligible Italian voters by blood lines rather than residency.
As it became apparent yesterday that he had been defeated by this system, which provides 12 deputies and six senators to represent Italians on foreign soil, the Prime Minister and media magnate reacted with outrage.
In a sombre speech yesterday, delivered shortly after official vote counts showed tight victories in both Italian legislatures for the left-wing coalition of Romano Prodi, Mr. Berlusconi said he would not accept the results.
He spoke of "many, many murky aspects" in the vote count, refused to concede defeat, and demanded a recount.
He was especially critical of the voting of "Italians abroad," who elected 12 seats in Italy's lower house and six seats in the senate. Four of those six seats went to Mr. Prodi's coalition, and a fifth, independent South American victor announced that he would also back Mr. Prodi.
That means that the "Italians abroad" determined the government, since Mr. Prodi's coalition won control of the Senate by only two seats, a margin of 158 seats to 156. Mr. Berlusconi's anger and scrutiny is now focused tightly on these votes, especially in the riding that represents North and Central America, in which Canadian votes proved decisive.
In Canada, 15,425 Italian-Canadians, or 44 per cent of those who cast ballots, voted for Mr. Prodi's coalition. In the United States, Mr. Berlusconi's coalition attracted a slightly larger number -- 15,148, or 34 per cent. But the Canadian votes for Mr. Prodi, along with a smaller number from Mexico, were enough to give him a victory here.
So the new Italian senate constituency of "North and Central America" will be represented by a leftist -- specifically, by Guerino Turano, the head of a Chicago-based baking company. Among the dozen foreign deputies elected to Italy's lower house was a Canadian, Gino Bucchino, a nutritionist and radio personality from Toronto.
Italians yesterday were just beginning to realize that their fate had been determined by people who have mostly entered their country only as tourists.
"It seems impossible," the Italian newspaper L'Unita writes in an editorial to appear today, "but the fate of this 2006 election has been decided by Italian émigrés of the second and third generation rather than by any people in Italy -- by men and women who were not born in their native land and, in the great majority of cases, have never lived there."
The "Italians abroad" voting scheme was designed by Mirko Tremaglia, the 80-year-old Minister of Italians in the World. An unapologetic defender of the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, Mr. Tremaglia is said to have modelled the scheme after a Fascist scheme that defined Italians as a race.
Under Mr. Tremaglia's new electoral law, eligible voters are defined as anyone with a continuous line of male descendants going back to a man born in Italy. The voter needs only to register with an Italian consulate, and does not have to speak Italian, have visited Italy or even have parents who were born in Italy.
When the scheme was introduced in 2002, it caused alarm among foreign governments. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs protested the move, and officials said last year they were prepared to ask the Italian government not to hold the vote.
But during the Canadian federal election campaign in December, then-foreign affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew abruptly announced that Canada would accept the "Italians abroad" vote. His riding, which he had won by a few hundred votes in the previous election, is heavily populated with Italian-Canadians.
Most Italian observers, including Mr. Berlusconi's officials, had apparently expected the "Italians abroad" to support Mr. Berlusconi's coalition. But Mr. Prodi was apparently aware that the foreign voters could provide his electoral salvation. His campaign spent considerable money sending campaign messages to Canada this year. A letter sent to Italian-Canadian households across Canada promised "to restore the deep cuts" made by Mr. Berlusconi's coalition to Italian consular services in Canada, and to make funds available for visits. |
