For those of you who missed Florida in 2000, tonight’s Italian parliamentary election results could have made a nice consolation prize. We had polls and exit polls predicting one thing (victory for the left!), post-election “projections” predicting another (victory for the right!), and then results that went in another direction (no one wins!). While it will still be a while still before we know anything for certain, but here are the major take-aways from Italian elections so far (as of midnight CET):
- Bad night for Monti
- Good night for Grillo’s 5 Star Party
- Berlusconi coalition probably wins the Senate, but without a majority
- Bersani coalition probably (although still very close) wins the House of Deputies and will therefore have 54% of seats despite only wining something close to 30% of the vote
- Grillo’s 5 Star party could form majority in Senate with either Bersani or Berlusconi in Senate, but probably won’t.
- This leaves a “Grand Coalition” of left and right as only other option for a government, but that probably won’t happen either
- Therefore, Italy will probably be looking at a few months of an interim government followed by another election later this spring
- Should have sold your Euros, Italian stocks, and Italian sovereign debt sometime around 3 PM CET today.
- You will be hearing a lot about Florence mayor Matteo Renzi in the coming months.
For a more thorough and more elegant report, I recommend this post on the blog suffragio. We’ll have our own post-election report(s) later this week.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, it seems that the center-left will also be the largest group in the Senate thanks to a very narrow victory in Piedmont. But even with Monti, they will not be able to outnumber Berlusconi+Grillo.
Pepe: Thanks for the update, as well as for hitting the main point in your comment, which is that this still will not be able to give them control of Senate even with Monti’s party. So we are still in the position where the center-left would need a coalition either with Grillo’s party or parties that ran with Berlusconi. Still probably unlikely and at best unstable.
Where is Nate Silver when you need him, or when there’s an election that is hard to predict?