Sunday 24 February 2013

A Filthy Election

Brazen-faced fraud seems to be the order of the day.  An electoral returning officer at Anzio, challenged by the scrutineer from the Five Star Movement was found to have in her bag blank ballots.  When required to explain she first stated they were 'deteriorated' and she had removed them so that they would not be used  then, on being pressed further by the scrutineers of other parties, had a fit of hysterics and tore the ballots to pieces in an attempt to hide her actions.  At this point she was arrested.  Another returning officer has been appointed.

The woman is a well known cadre of the Bersani faction of the 'Democratic' Party.

UPDATE

The Ministry of the Interior has announced that based on the returns from 8,092 comune out of 8,092 the turn out is 46.80% at 7 pm., compared with a turn out of 49.21% in 2008 (when the Democratic Party led by the former communist Walter Veltroni lost to Silvio Berlusconi's People of Liberty Party.  It is noteworthy that only when the Democratic Party has been led by the Christian Democrat Romano Prodi has it won an election; the only former communist to hold the office of prime minister  as leader of the Democratic Party was Massimo d'Alema when he took over from Romano Prodi after - on dit -  engineering his downfall by arranging the withdrawal of support by a communist splinter group; like Gordon Brown in the United Kingdom, d'Alema held power with someone else's majority.)

Watching the news this evening there is a very low tone expressed by the usual right-on Bersani suspects, which suggests that unpublished (and forbidden) exit polls are not looking like those in 1997 for Blair.

5 comments:

Jeff Wood said...

On the election posters put up here by the Partito Democratico, there are mugshots and pen portraits of their candidates, nine in all if memory serves.

One is a doctor, the only one doing a useful job. The rest are "lecturers" and "researchers", which I imagine is code for party hacks. Maybe one is a union official.

I looked at the faces and saw Labour Party apparatchik all over each one.

hatfield girl said...

I was looking at an analysis of the candidates, compared across the parties for age, gender, profession, previous experience....

The Partito Democratico had a profile of: over 45; mostly men with a placing on the lists high enough to stand a good chance of election; local, provincial or regional politician if not a parliamentarian seeking re-election; mostly obtaining their living from politics and always had (not for nothing did Grillo reply to Bersani's criticism of his being a millionaire that Bersani is a parasite; and, to top it all off, with the lowest levels of education.

I was surprised to see that the People of Liberty came out rather well on gender, educational achievement, and unsurprised that they had entrepreneurs, professionals, factory owners etc.; they didn't do very well on age.

5Star are the youngest, best educated, least political, mostly employees rather than employers and half of them are women.

dearieme said...

In English "cadre" refers to a group not an individual.

hatfield girl said...

Mmmm, Dearieme. Once I would have taken your point and withdrawn the use of the word, but in the circles where the word cadre is used widely it has become used in singular and plural.

Still, you ARE right and I won't do it again.

dearieme said...

The singular 'cadre' is another abomination by the Bolsheviks.