Berlusconi's Opponent Concedes in Italian Election

Italy's center-left leader, Walter Veltroni, tonight conceded defeat to Silvio Berlusconi in the country's elections.

Veltroni said he called conservative leader Berlusconi to congratulate him on his victory.

"As is customary in all western democracy, and as I feel it is right to do, I called the leader of the People of Freedom, Silvio Berlusconi, to acknowledge his victory and wish him good luck in his job," Veltroni told reporters.

He said the result is clear even though the final results are not in yet.

Projections earlier today showed the 71-year-old billionaire and his rightwing allies heading back to power in the Italian general election with a convincing majority.

The projections, based on a small sample of the overall vote, gave Berlusconi's Freedom Folk party and its allies 44.9% of the vote in the senate, against 38.2% for the center-left.

If confirmed as the count unfolds, the margin would translate into a majority of seats that would be big enough to allow Berlusconi to govern without needing new alliances.

However, Italian politicians were being cautious in their predictions after their experience in the general election two years ago when the balance of advantage shifted during the evening.

Counting for the lower house, the chamber of deputies, had yet to begin. Exit polls indicated the gap between the two main parties here was narrower, at two percentage points.

Much will depend on the showing of smaller parties unallied with either of the two main contestants. Exit polls commissioned by the Italian state-owned broadcaster RAI gave them 16-20% of the vote.

Two parties in particular could yet influence the outcome: the Union of Center and Christian Democrats (UDC), which was allied with Berlusconi, and the Rainbow Left, which takes in Marxists and Greens who were formally united with the center-left.

Both exit polls and initial projections pointed to a triumph for a third party, the Northern League, which is allied to Berlusconi's movement. The stridently anti-immigrant League could have a big effect on the new government's policies if the forecasts are borne out.

Polls closed just after lunch at the end of a day and a half of voting and a campaign stretching back to the fall of Romano Prodi's centre-left government on January 28.

With both of the leading candidates offering strikingly similar programs, the contest was a lackluster affair until the final week, when Veltroni appeared to be narrowing the gap on Berlusconi, the clear early favorite looking for another return to power.

In the last few days of campaigning, 52-year-old Veltroni drew a crowd of tens of thousands in Berlusconi's home city of Milan, while the media tycoon was able to muster only a few thousand in his rival's home town of Rome.

In his final rally at the Colosseum, Berlusconi appeared to give away votes by criticizing the local football hero Francesco Totti, saying he was "off his head" for wanting to vote for the center-left in the mayoral election, which was also being held today.

Italy's next government faces the unenviable task of trying to reinvigorate a failing economy, and that was reflected in the campaign's generally cautious rhetoric.

One issue that helped to doom Prodi's administration was news from the European Union that the Italian economy had been overtaken by that of Spain. Other symptoms of the country's failure came together in a rubbish crisis that engulfed Naples and the surrounding region of Campania.

Both of the leading contenders to become prime minister offered a formula involving lower taxes and higher spending, which they insisted could be made to work with a huge program of public asset sales.

In the short term, the biggest task facing Italy's next leader will be to decide what to do about the stalled negotiations to sell Alitalia. Talks between unions and the airline's only prospective buyer, Air France-KLM, ground to a halt after Berlusconi said the Franco-Dutch offer was unacceptable. He raised the possibility of an all-Italian consortium of buyers, but none has yet materialized.

The elections employ a complex system under which ballots do not necessarily translate into seats. This is particularly true in the senate where, in each region, the winning party gets a "victor's bonus". Added together, they could have a decisive effect on the overall result.