Italians Don’t Vote

Posted on by

The low turnout – a 25.9 which fell far short of the necessary 50% minumum to secure a binding impact on parliament – means that the proposal to reform Italian law on assisted reproduction and embryo research effectively did not prosper.

In fact a majority of those who did vote voted to change the law.

This result is being widely covered as a ‘victory’ for the moral preachings of the new pope Benedicat XVI. I am sure it is nothing like that simple.

This entry was posted in A Few Euros More, Western and Central Europe and tagged by Edward Hugh. Bookmark the permalink.

About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

One thought on “Italians Don’t Vote”

  1. I don’t think so either. Italy has had a number of referendum “duds” in the past few years. This one just proves that referenda about difficult issues make a poor political instruments.

    Still, this time it put the Vatican back in the Italian political game as a player. So score one for Benedicat XVI. Could be a good thing down the road actually.

Comments are closed.