When dawn broke after Italy's longest election night in recent history, it was still unclear whether Silvio Berlusconi had won or lost. At 3 am on April 11 center-left leader Romano Prodi had declared victory to a huge crowd huddled in the cold outside his campaign headquarters since early afternoon. But the race was far closer than the comfortable win for Prodi that the exit polls had predicted. And although Prodi won the vote in the Chamber of Deputies by a margin of just 25,000 votes out of 38 million cast, it was not until noon on day two that it became clear that he had also won the vote in the Senate, guaranteeing his victory. In a strange twist, the votes that put Prodi over the top at 158 senators to 156 came from abroad--from immigrant Italians and their descendants, an electorate everyone, especially the leaders of the ex-Fascist party Alleanza Nazionale, allied with Berlusconi, had assumed would vote for the far right.

With the popular vote at a 50-50 standoff for the two big coalitions, Italy was divided as it had not been since 1948, when the Italian Communist Party ran against the conservative Christian Democrats in a memorable cold war battle. When a prime minister calls the opposition voters, as Berlusconi did, coglioni--a vulgar word for testicles best translated as "assholes"--a line has been drawn from which it is difficult to retreat. And that was only one of the many occasions on which Berlusconi broke the written and unwritten rules of democratic politics.

So, true to form, Berlusconi refused to concede defeat, even as two of the allied parties in his center-right coalition acknowledged it had lost. After a daylong conference hammering out the boilerplate with his coalition partners, he read out a carefully worded one-sentence statement asking for a recount of some 40,000 contested ballots for the lower house, a process that takes several days. Then he suddenly launched into what appeared to be an impromptu proposal for a bipartisan grande coalizione government in the interests of national unity, like that headed by Angela Merkel in Germany. Although he acts determined to hold on to power no matter what, Berlusconi has lost the election under the law and has no option other than to step down at the end of his mandate in a few weeks, and he is expected to do so.

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