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.