Prodi faces challenge to 0.07% lead

A centre-left coalition victory in the Italian parliament’s lower house rests on just 0.07 per cent of votes cast in the country’s closest ever elections.

Romano Prodi’s Ulivo alliance has claimed victory as Silvio Berlusconi demands a recount of results for the Italian lower house – the Chamber of Deputies.

Ulivo scraped in with a margin of just 25,224 votes out of over 38 million cast – a result that will hang on tenths of a per cent.

In the parliament’s upper house, the Italian Senate, Berlusconi's coalition currently holds a one-seat lead but Prodi is claiming he will get four of the six seats set aside for expatriate Italians.

"We have won. From today we turn a page," Prodi told a rally in a Rome some 12 hours after the polls closed.

"The country is divided...it was a very difficult battle, until the last minute we were on the edge of the razor but in the end victory arrived," the former European commission president declared.

But Berlusconi’s Casa della Liberta coalition is not yet prepared to admit defeat and some Italian commentators are predicting a re-run of America’s infamous Florida recount.

"Neither side reached 50 per cent (in the lower house) and the margin is under 25,000 votes. Such a tiny difference necessitates a scrupulous checking of the counting and tally sheets," Paolo Bonauiti, Berlusconi's right-hand man, told journalists in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Under Italy's new electoral system, winners are automatically granted 340 of the lower house's 630 seats no matter how small their margin of victory in the popular vote. The runners up take some 277 seats.

The Berlusconi government overhauled the electoral system in December 2005, returning Italy to full proportional representation after more than a decade.

The changes abolished a mixed system where three-quarters of seats in both houses were decided in first-past-the-post contests and one quarter by PR.

Critics say it was a cynical move designed to boost the governing coalition's position and will create weak governments while splitting Italy between left and right.

“We will never forget the political convulsion of April 10 2006,” Tuesday’s edition of il Corriere della Sera comments.

“It provides a stark reminder that Italy is a country split in two - where governments are formed and lost on a handful of votes thanks to a most curious electoral law. We could now face different majorities in the senate and lower house.”

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