Turner loses parliament seats in Italian election decided by expatriate votes

<p>The daughter-in-law of CNN founder Ted Turner is happy she helped hand Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi nearly twice as many votes as his center-left opponent got from Italians living in the Southeast, the region where his party, "Forza Italia," won by the biggest margin in the U.S.</p><p>But that wasn't enough for either Angela Della Costanza Turner or Berlusconi, whose massive loss among expatriates worldwide was credited for his razor-thin defeat in Italy's chaotic parliamentary elections, according to results announced Tuesday.</p><p>"I'm happy my votes anyway gave the party a deputy," Turner said in a phone interview from Rome.</p><p>The 37-year-old architect from Genoa, Italy, who married CNN founder Ted Turner's son, gained about 3,400 votes, not enough to secure a seat for herself but enough for her party to win a seat for fellow center-right Forza Italia candidate Salvatore Ferrigno from Philadelphia. Between 30 and 35 percent of the approximately 400,000 Italians in Turner's North and Central America district voted.</p><p>"Italians abroad have a fundamental weight and that's demonstrated now," said Turner, who stopped working as the honorary Italian consul in Atlanta for the last three weeks to campaign for one of the 12 positions in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies chosen by Italians in the four expatriate districts _ North and Central America, Latin America, Europe and the rest of the world.</p><p>Italians abroad also elected six candidates in the 315-seat Senate. Winning four of those seats gave Romano Prodi's center-left coalition 158 Senate seats to 156 for Berlusconi _ the minimum necessary to have a majority and form a government. Berlusconi refused to concede defeat Tuesday.</p><p>The result _ with Forza Italia bringing in nearly 200,000 fewer overseas votes for each chamber than Prodi's L'Unione _ is ironic given that it was Berlusconi's government that passed the legislation giving the overseas Italians the right to vote in 2001.</p><p>In the United States, voters were expected to chose parties allied with the center-right, shunning the Communists in Prodi's coalition, said Joe Cerrell, the vice chairman of the National Italian American Foundation.</p><p>They did, giving Berlusconi's conservative forces about 60 percent of the 44,622 votes cast for the Senate, for example. But that's counting the at least six right-leaning allies running separately _ their tallies can't be combined.</p><p>When Berlusconi's and Prodi's parties are compared, Berlusconi won in the United States by only a few hundred votes. But Prodi gained an edge of nearly 7,000 votes in the North and Central America district, securing a crucial Senate seat.</p><p>Turner blamed the party's loss on that splintering.</p><p>But Tito Mazzetta, the Atlanta lawyer who acted as trustee for Turner's campaign budget, said Berlusconi's much-touted support for Bush might have be behind the lost expatriate votes at a time when Bush's approval ratings have hit a new low.</p><p>"The persona of Berlusconi is bound in an intrinsic manner to Bush, to the disastrous campaign in Iraq," Mazzetta said.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/4/126130