The Day After

What do we make of the decimal difference between l’Unione and Casa della Liberta in today’s elections?
Maybe, politics is just like a 100m sprint where 1/100's of a second decide about victory…
Or rather the parity is due to the nearly similar programme presented by the coalitions, which turned the elections into something similar to a coin flipping exercise with a 50/50 chance of heads or tails, red or blue, Prodi or Berlusconi. Given the large sample of voters (turnout of more than 80% ), the laws of probability were unsurprisingly proved right.
We could go on and explain the surrealist outcome with other banal parallels, but the German election outcome from last autumn hints an answer. Like in Germany last fall, voters in Italy turned up to the poling stations with no conviction, that any of the two parties will make a real difference. No clear mandate was given to either of the sides. The German leaders correctly interpreted this as a public call for a bi-partisan approach to solving the country’s problems. In Italy however, no similar solution is to be anticipated. The near electoral tie and the cut throat margin of advantage in the two chambers is most likely to lead partisan politics into over-time and a brutal penalty shoot-out between the two camps.

In light of what the future is likely to hold, the return of DC-like, centre politics, still remains a distant, but no longer surrealist alternative.