On a bright winter morning in the Italian town of Monza, in the Lombardy region near Milan, a group of young political activists fanned out to rustle votes for their man, Pier Luigi Bersani, head of the center-left Democratic Party. What was unusual wasn’t so much what they were doing—with parliamentary elections just a week away, campaign season was in full swing—it was how far some of them had traveled to do it. “The idea was to come where it’s really needed,” explained Elly Schlein, who had bused in that morning from the city of Bologna, some 140 miles away. “Everybody is realizing that Lombardy is where the game will be played.”
Italians will cast their ballots on Feb. 24 and 25, but not every vote will count the same. The country has two chambers of parliament, and a majority in each is needed to pass laws and form a government. Bersani, who is ahead in national polls, is expected to have little trouble in the lower house, where victory is given to the coalition that wins the largest share of the popular vote. More complicated is the situation in the Senate, where seats are allocated region-by-region in a system reminiscent of the American electoral college.
And so Italians have been introduced to the concept of swing states, regions on which the fate of Europe’s third-largest economy could very well hang. As of Feb. 8, the last day on which polls were permitted to be published, some five of Italy’s 20 regions were too close to call. Most notable among them: Lombardy, the country’s most populous region, from which will come 12 percent of the Senate’s lawmakers.
It was in response to the critical importance of Lombardy that Schlein and her friends had launched what they called “Operation Ohio,” a get-out-the-vote effort named for the American swing state. “It’s based on something that is done during U.S. presidential elections,” says Guissepe Civati, a parliamentary candidate from Monza. “You take volunteers from across the country and move them where they count.” To be sure, the Italian effort—organized in less than a week—was on a much smaller scale. In some 40 towns across the region, local party members had been joined by activists from as far away as Aquila, 400 miles to the south. The symbol for the day was a big red button, which provided volunteers encouragement for participants to “buttonhole” voters from Lombardy, bending their ears on the importance of casting their ballots.
Schlein, 27, who holds both Italian and American passports, volunteered for Barack Obama in the United States in 2008 and 2012, and had come back impressed by the presidential campaign’s ground game. “This is an attempt to bring that experience here,” she said. She was spending the morning ripping photos from her Twitter feed and posting them to the group’s Facebook (FB) page. Later, she would send out challenges, like “buttonhole a barista,” encouraging volunteers to send snaps of their conquests.“The idea is to make things a bit dynamic,” she said.
In an election whose national vote has never been in doubt, the true drama is played out in contests like the one in Lombardy. Silvio Berlusconi, the sex-scandal-plagued media mogul, has spent the last two months making increasingly wild promises, wrestling his way into second place. While Berlusconi remains too weak to win the senate outright, the strength of his showing could determine the future of the country. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario similar to what happened in 2006, when Romano Prodi formed a government that depended on a single vote in the Senate. It hung on for just two years before collapsing.
Alternatively, a close result could open the door for another candidate: Mario Monti, the technocratic prime minister who was appointed in 2011 and charged with putting Italy’s economic house in order. Though his showing in the polls has been poor, he is likely to command enough senators to push Bersani back into the majority. “It’s a funny paradox,” says Roberto D’Alimonti, a political scientists at LUISS University in Rome. “Monti has to cheer for Berlusconi, to hope that he becomes a spoiler. Only then can Monti become the pivotal actor in the Senate.” Italians have spent the days before the election worrying about “swing states.” They could spend the rest of the year learning about “swing votes.”
Faris is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.
