ITALY WENT TO the polls on the weekend of April 13 & 14, 2008 and elected a right-wing coalition government with a historic majority of seats. Silvio Berlusconi will become prime minister for the third time since 1994, and will form the sixty-second post-war government in coalition with two regionalist parties, Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord and Raffaele Lombardo’s Movement for Autonomy. Mr. Berlusconi is in control of 344 seats in the lower chamber, a lead of 98 seats over the single left-wing grouping under Walter Veltroni.

The Chamber of Deputies: Berlusconi’s coalition: 344 seats (+102) Union of the Centre: 36 seats (-3) Veltroni’s coalition: 246 seats (+9) Minor parties: 4 The Senate: Berlusconi’s coalition: 174 seats (+39) Union of the Centre: 3 seats (-18) Veltroni’s coalition: 132 seats (+23) Elected by Italians overseas: 6

The snap election was called after Prime Minister Romano Prodi, head of a pan-leftist coalition, failed to survive a vote of confidence in the Italian Senate in January when a minor party withdrew its support. The Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano (himself a prominent former member of the Italian Communist Party), asked the President of the Senate, Franco Marini, to look into forming an interim government to reform Italy’s complex electoral laws before a new election would take place. (The current electoral laws were blamed, in part, for the hung Senate). Mr. Marini, however, reported back to the President that he could not find the necessary parliamentary support for an interim government, and so the general election was called for April.

The surprise of the election was the right-wing majority in the troublesome Senate, which is elected regionally rather than based solely on population. There Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition’s won 174 seats, a majority of 17 and with 42 more seats than Mr. Veltroni’s coalition.

For the first time in the post-war era, there is no Communisty party represented in the Italian parliament, though many ex-Communists have joined the Democratic Party headed by Mr. Veltroni.

One of the dominant themes of the period leading up to the election has been the convergence of Italy’s dozens of political parties into fewer and larger entities. This process has taken place both on the Left and the Right, with varying success.

Mr. Berlusconi succeeded in merging his own Forza Italia party with the Alleanza Nazionale headed by Gianfranco Fini into a new party called “Il Popolo della Libertà” (PdL) — the People of Freedom. Forza Italia (literally “Go Italy!”) was founded in the 1990’s by the millionaire businessman Mr. Berlusconi as a personalist vehicle supporting his successful bid to become Italy’s prime minister. The Alleanza Nazionale, meanwhile, was originally the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the main fascist party of the post-war period. The MSI evolved during the 1990s into a more mainstream party defending the family, law and order, and opposing mass immigration. Despite the AN’s closeness to the Catholic Church’s positions, Mr. Fini still retains a number of views from his party’s more fascist days, namely a support for abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. However, his views on this issues are almost completely out of step with the rest of the Allianza Nazionale.

The northern regionalist Lega Nord founded and led by the eccentric Umberto Bossi joined the PdL in coalition but will not be merging into the party itself. The Lega Nord hopes to gain more regional autonomy, to restrict immigration, and will oppose any move to lessen the power of the smaller political parties. Of the northern regions, it is strongest in the Veneto, Lombardy, and the Trentino, but is almost insignificant in Tuscany, the Marches, and especially Umbria. Mr. Bossi has previously advocated independence for northern Italy — which he and his supporters call “Padania” — but the party currently focuses more on decentralisation and moving power away from Rome and towards the regions.

The christian-democrat Union of the Center was formed mostly by the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC) headed by Pier Ferdinando Casini, alongside the smaller White Rose, Party of Christian Democracy, and Christian Democratic Party as coalition partners. Mr. Casini’s UDC was invited by Mr. Berlusconi to join Il Popolo della Libertà but decided against the move. The conservative christian-democrats are generally wary of Mr. Berlusconi who, through the media outlets he owns, introduced what can only be described as light pornography onto Italian television.

The UDC is particularly influenced by the social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and is widely perceived to be the party closest to the Vatican. It is also the party of Rocco Buttiglione, the politician and philosopher whose nomination to the European Commission was famously rejected for stating his fidelity to Catholic Christian teaching on sexual immorality when officially asked by a Member of the European Parliament.

The Union of the Center (UdiC) supported Pier Ferdinando Casini for prime minister instead of Mr. Berlusconi. Winning 36 seats, a loss of three from the last parliament, the UdiC failed to break through as the third force of Italian politics, and suffered significant losses in the less-representative Senate. Nonetheless, they maintain a respectable number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and, with a two-party divergence between the PdL and the Democratic Party emerging, it is perhaps signficant that they have come out of the election relatively unscathed.

On the Left, the spirit of convergence resulted in the numerous leftist groups merging into two main parties.

Walter Veltroni’s Democratic Party (PD) united a handful of leftist parties, most significantly the Democrats of the Left (which was joined by most Communists once the Moscow-supported party dissolved in 1991), the left-centrist “Democracy is Freedom - Daisy” party, and various reformist groupings. The Democratic Party is based on the L’Ulivo (Olive Tree) coalition formed by Romano Prodi, whose 1996 electoral success brought Communists into the Italian government for the first time since 1946.

The far Left avoided the Democratic Party; the Communist Refoundation Party, the Party of Italian Communists, the Federation of Greens, and the Democratic Left merged to form “la Sinistra - l’Arcobaleno” (The Left - The Rainbow). The Rainbow Left did so poorly in the election as to not win any seats at all. The absence of the Rainbow Left from parliament may shift support to the Democratic Party, the only leftist party in parliament apart from the single-issue anti-corruption Italia dei Valori. Such a shift, however, might draw the PD further left, losing it the essential support of centrists. It is entirely possible, though, that they will stage a comeback in the next general election.

Mr. Berlusconi has stated that his plans for government include improving the state of the economy, lowering taxes, reforming the justice system, reducing the public debt, and shrinking the cabinet to twelve ministers.