The votes of Italians abroad were decisive in obtaining the victory, albeit by a narrow margin, of Romano Prodi in Italy’s general elections. An Italy divided into two emerged from the ballot. A situation that requires prudence from everyone, as underlined in its headline by the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire of 12/4. The paper’s editorialist, Marco Tarquinio , comments as follows on the election results; “The lesson that can be drawn from the vote of forty million Italians is an invitation to honesty, which can and must become a genuine sentiment of the country… It’s up to the politicians to find a way out” , taking into account the situation of a country divided into two. “Here there’s a need to unite and re-unite, to include and not exclude, with real efforts to understand the reasons of others”. Reactions to the elections in Italy have also been expressed in Germany. Roman Arens of the Frankfurter Rundschau (12/4) comments as follows: “ With a slim majority and in this political climate, how will it be possible to introduce tough and unpopular decisions, such as those that years ago led to social unrest in a far more tranquil situation, as was that of Germany? A minority that failed to win the vote by a whisker will predictably be little inclined to support the wide-ranging objectives of the majority. On the contrary: it will only wait for the government to trip up and fall. The prospect of returning to power is far more attractive that an exercise of political responsibility. The appeals of Romano Prodi to restore unity to the country are as reasonable as they are futile. Italy is heading towards difficult times, even more difficult“. The comment in Die Welt is lapidary: “ These elections seem – for the time being – to indicate a return to “normal” Italian situations, in which the Italians have distinguished themselves as ‘masters of chaos’ among the nations of Europe. The union of nine parties that the diligent professor [Prodi] has led to the finishing line seems too fragile and broad. Ten years ago, the last government of Prodi fell after barely two years because his Communist allies abandoned the coalition. […] Among many questions opened, only one response is so far clear. In Italy the ‘Grosse Koalition’ is pronounced as a German brand name. The concept is foreign to Rome, and so is the process that lies behind it“. And the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13/4) comments as follows: “ The current electoral law, once defined by Prodi as ‘unconstitutional’, has now rebounded to the advantage of the left. But that does not presage anything good for the future. For the majority bonus is granted automatically. The fact that the individual parties declared themselves favourable to forming a coalition and accepting a candidate leader, in this case Prodi, in the other Berlusconi, was enough. With the previous electoral law they had to agree on a candidate of the coalition already at the level of the individual constituencies. That constituted an instructive and often salutary process of political harmonization“. The Italian electoral results are also reported and commented on in the Spanish dailies of 11/4. In its editorial entitled “Romano Prodi will have to govern a divided Italy” El Mundo declares that this triumph “is the best news for democracy in Italy, which has a need for an impulse of renewal. In no case could that have been given by a prime minister on whom innumerable suspicions of corruption rest”. “Italy divided in two” is the headline in La Razòn , according to which “in Italy, as the results show, there still exists a strong feeling of collective belonging to the nation, which is forcefully resurgent when liberalism and intransigence are incapable of maintaining levels of prosperity” . In the view of La Vanguardia “the result achieved by Silvio Berlusconi, after five years of government, may undoubtedly represent a fresh burst of oxygen for a man who concluded the electoral campaign amid the insults of his adversaries and generous promises of tax cuts”. A long reportage by Enric Gonzáles in El Paìs semanal of 9/4 analyses the Italian situation and its background in the light of the electoral campaign, in an Italy that he describes as “frozen” and “ruled by a male gerontocracy” , without anyone being “able to diagnose the causes of its paralysis” . Pushing all the political and sociological analyses to one side, the author writes: “if a great division does exist, it is outside ideologies. It’s the division between the rich North and the poor South” with “the Veneto that could be in Austria, Lombardy in Germany or in Switzerland, and Campania in Morocco” . Another Spanish daily, Abc , devotes its attention instead to the recent document of the Spanish bishops “Theology and secularization in Spain. Forty years after the end of Vatican Council II” . Under its headline: “The bishops against moral relativism” , the paper writes that “The Church is not a cyclical but a permanent organization that transcends concrete historical situations, even the most adverse”. “The Church – adds the paper – is hierarchical and demands an acceptance in which reason and faith are compatible up to a certain point, so long as personal involvement does not intervene in faith in Christ as God and Church”. She therefore acts “in a society of freedom and does not impose anything on anyone, even if she claims to convince and influence, with full legitimacy, the future of the societies in which she is present”.
