Italy Deadlocked After Crucial Elections

Chaos looms after no clear winner emerges
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 26, 2013 12:39 AM CST
Italy Deadlocked After Crucial Elections
Pier Luigi Bersani, right, leader of the Democratic Party, casts his vote with his wife Daniela, in Piacenza, Italy.   (AP Photo/Marco Vasini)

One of the most closely watched Italian elections of recent years has delivered a suitably dramatic result. Pier Luigi Bersani's center-left bloc has narrowly beaten Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition to win control of the lower house, but failed to win a majority in the Senate—leaving Italy likely to face a hung parliament for the first time in its history, Reuters reports. Comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement captured around a quarter of the vote, a stunning result that makes it the single largest party in the lower house.

Control of both houses is needed to form a stable government and although Bersani's coalition won the most seats in the Senate, it looks as if it will be unable to pass laws without the consent of Grillo's anti-EU, anti-austerity movement, der Spiegel reports. A Berlusconi-Grillo alliance is seen as highly unlikely. "Dialogue with Berlusconi? It is very difficult to imagine that Berlusconi would propose useful ideas," a 5-Star Movement candidate tells the AP. "It never happened until now, but miracles happen." Predictions of political chaos in the EU's third-largest economy led to steep drops in markets worldwide. (More Italy stories.)

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