Home > Italy vote overshadowed by Mafia-style killing

Italy vote overshadowed by Mafia-style killing

by Open-Publishing - Monday 17 October 2005

Edito Parties Elections-Elected Italy

ROME - Primaries to select the centre-left candidate to run against Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in next year’s elections were held on Sunday but were marred by a Mafia-style killing of a local politician.

Turnout was high for the first vote of its kind in Italy, almost certain to choose former European Commission President Romano Prodi to head the opposition ticket next spring.

But before the polls closed, police said two masked gunmen shot dead Francesco Fortugno, 54-year-old vice president of the regional government of the southern Calabria region, as he exited a polling station.

"On a day full of joy, criminality has tried to make its murderous voice heard," Prodi said in a message to Fortugno’s family. It was the most high-profile assassination in the region in 16 years.

Politicians from across the political spectrum denounced the shocking murder and Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said he would fly to Calabria early on Monday, assuring the killing will continue to overshadow the primary result.

The results were due sometime after midnight (11 p.m. British time), with Prodi almost certain to triumph against six other candidates drawn from across the centre-left spectrum.

When the 10,000 polling booths closed at 10 p.m. after 14 hours of voting, organisers were predicting more than 3 million votes had been cast.

"This is above our every expectation," Prodi said.

Berlusconi’s supporters had denounced the primaries as a farce and said the vote had been rendered meaningless by a change to the electoral system that the government looks certain to introduce before the 2006 ballot.

Opposition leaders say the reform, which will usher in a complex version of proportional representation, was devised to try to keep Berlusconi in power.

ELECTORAL SWINDLE

Recent opinion polls forecast that the centre left would have secured a handsome victory under the old voting system, but would do less well with the newlook proportional representation, which puts less of an emphasis on the respective coalition leaders.

Prodi, who defeated Berlusconi at the ballot box in 1996, had called on Italians to use the primaries to signal their protest at the reform, and supporters standing in line to vote on Sunday said they were furious about the changes.

"The electoral law is a swindle. In what other civilised country would you be able to change the election laws six months before the vote?" said Giovanni Florio, 35, an office worker, looking to vote at a booth near Rome’s Villa Borghese.

Berlusconi had faced pressure to copy the opposition and hold centre-right primaries, but he has withstood the calls and got a boost at the weekend when his most vehement critic within the government resigned as leader of a ruling coalition party.

Marco Follini quit the leadership of Union of Christian Democrats (UDC) after failing to get backing for his calls to unseat Berlusconi and after failing to prevent the parliamentary progress of the electoral reform bill.

"We need a law in which cunning and virtue are held equally and not a situation where one crushes the other," he said on Saturday after announcing his decision.

The reform poses a particular headache for Prodi, who is not a member of any political party. This was allowed under the previous system and guaranteed him independence in dealing with his varied allies, but it is not allowed by the new text.

This means he must either sign up to a centre-left party, tying him to one of the many opposition factions, or create his own party, which would directly compete with his allies.

Reuters
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