Berlusconi wins Italian election

Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the conservative People of Freedom party, has won a majority in both houses of Italy's parliament following elections at the weekend.
 
Walter Veltroni, Italy's centre-left leader, telephoned Berlusconi on Monday to concede victory to the 71-year-old billionaire.
   
"I will govern for five years," he said after the call from his rival. "We have difficult months ahead that will require great strength."

He offered "an affectionate kiss to all Italians" before ending the telephone interview.
   
Veltroni said: "As is customary in all Western democracies, 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."

Projected lead

Projections from partial results give Berlusconi's party a lead of 44.9 per cent to Veltroni's 39.2 per cent in the lower house.
In the senate, Italy's upper house, Berlusconi is predicted to take 46.6 per cent, against 38.7 per cent for the opposition.

Berlusconi had been widely expected to win in the lower house, but his clear victory in the Senate will strengthen his ability to push through structural changes needed to pull Italy away from the brink of recession.
 
Silvia Pepino, a JP Morgan economist, said: "If Berlusconi wins a clear victory, as these projections suggest, we will at least have a government and that is a better outcome for the economy than the uncertainty of a hung parliament."

Initial exit polls had shown Berlusconi to have been only narrowly ahead, but his lead extended as the counting went on.

"Berlusconi won because he has a strong coalition and because people feel that on the other side, the government is going to take them nowhere," Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor at Rome's John Cabot University, said.

The early election was called after the centre-left coalition government of Romano Prodi collapsed in January, having completed 20 months in power.

Economic challenges
Both Berlusconi, a media tycoon and two-time former prime minister, and Veltroni, a former mayor of Rome, had promised to reverse Italy's economic downturn and said that Italy needs more police to tackle crime.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts that the Italian economy, the world's seventh largest, will grow 0.3 percent this year, compared with a 1.4 percent average growth for the 15-country euro area.

James Walston, a political scientist at the American University of Rome, sid that people woould expect Berlusconi "to pull big rabbits out of his hat, but he's only going to give them small ones".

Berlusconi said on Monday that his priorities were settling the future of state-controlled airline Alitalia, which the outgoing administration was
struggling to privatise, and clean up a long-standing rubbish crisis in Naples.