Berlusconi Sweeps Back to Power As Left Concedes Defeat in Italian Elections

Silvio Berlusconi was poised last night to storm back into power at the head of the most rightwing government in Italy since he first came to office 14 years ago.

Projections gave Berlusconi's Freedom Folk movement a convincing victory over Walter Veltroni's Democratic Party (DP) in the general election held yesterday and on Sunday. The center-left leader phoned Berlusconi to congratulate him.

Crucially, the controversial media tycoon's party appeared to have clinched a working majority in the senate where, under Italy's electoral system, only a sizable win can deliver the necessary seats.

The projections indicated that Freedom Folk would win a majority in the upper house with at least 166 of the 315 seats - 28 more than the DP, the election's biggest loser.

Antonello Soro, a senior Democratic Party MP, said its defeat appeared to be "of greater dimensions than expected". In the vote for the lower house, the chamber of deputies, projections indicated that the Freedom Folk, which includes Gianfranco Fini's "post-fascists", had a seemingly unassailable 6% lead.

If the trends emerging from the projections are confirmed, then Italy's next government will be considerably further to the right than the one that ruled the country for five tumultuous years to 2006. Berlusconi will no longer have to take into account the moderating influence of the center-right Union of Christian and Center Democrats (UDC), which broke with him shortly before the campaign.

The virulently anti-immigrant Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, also had a resounding triumph. Bossi's party looks certain to be a conspicuous presence in the new parliament. It fought the campaign with a poster depicting a Native American and the slogan: "They too had immigration. Now they live on reservations."

At the other end of the political spectrum, the vote for a new Marxist-Green alliance crumbled. Projections suggested the Rainbow Left would not get a single candidate into the senate and might not even get one in the chamber of deputies.

That pointed to an important development. For the first time since the second world war, Italy will have a parliament cleanly divided between two main groups. That should bring the country stability.

Yet Berlusconi's predicted triumph will send a shiver of apprehension through Brussels where memories are still fresh of the way his government let Italy's public finances run out of control, threatening the stability of the euro. Romano Prodi, the former European commission president and Italy's ex-prime minister who narrowly defeated Berlusconi two years ago, reversed the trend. But to cut the budget deficit, he made the center-left deeply unpopular by putting up taxes and clamping down on evasion.

Italy's next government faces an unenviable task in trying to reinvigorate a failing economy. That was reflected in the generally cautious rhetoric of both leading candidates in the campaign. Last year, the EU announced that the Italian economy had been overtaken by Spain's.

Other symptoms of Italy's failure are legion. They include a flag-carrier airline, Alitalia, which is losing €1m a day, and a refuse crisis that engulfed Naples and the surrounding region of Campania and appeared to many Italians to embody their country's plight. Projections suggested the right had triumphed by an unusually large margin in Campania.

During the campaign, Berlusconi vowed to slash taxes and boost infrastructure spending in an effort to stimulate the economy. He insisted the budget deficit could nevertheless be contained by improving efficiency in the public administration and embarking on a huge program of public asset sales.

The turnout, usually high in Italy, was three points lower than at the last general election in 2006 - 82% compared with 85%, according to initial data from the interior ministry. There was speculation that the drop reflected disillusion, particularly among the young, with an aging and cronyism-prone political class.

Ironically, the country looks set for five years of government headed by a 71-year-old man who has a string of trials behind him for alleged financial wrongdoing. All his convictions have been overturned on appeal and other charges against him expired under statutes of limitations.