you have to laugh

[adriatica]

It seems like the new PD Party...its an amalgamation of several of the left wing parties and is now according to them the largest single party in Italy...has started of in the true traditional way of most political parties here

anyway last weekend they had an election for the leadership of this new paty... veltroni the mayor of rome won... however the voting procedure was filmed in several voting stations and it was apparent from this that a lot of the voting members took the opportunity ...especialley those that were around the age of 16 and many non italians to vote several times...it seems odd because you had to pay e1 to vote and a lot of these people didnt look much like they would have had just e1 let alone the five or six times they paid over money...

it seems obvious that there was a chance to get a bit of pocket money for going to these private poll staions more than once

if this is the way they herald in the new dawn of more open and honest polotics here it makes you wonder even more hat the old parties got up to...

apart from all that the people of Rome are not that happy because their mayor has been on the campaign trail for the last year... doing very little for the city he is supposed to be running and now wih two jobs, yet another president of another party and mayor of the capital...

[ronald]

the grand idea behind the PD - to reduce the number of parties - has only led to the creation of at least 2 or three new parties in addition to the PD. Parties created by people of the Democratici di Sinistra and Margherita not happy with the idea of loosing their power base to a bigger entity. So Italy now has more parties and it just got a whole lot more complicated to figure out Italian politics... I think Grillo (the Italian comedian turned voice of the people disgruntled with policiticians) need to organise a V-decade and not just a V-day

For those wondering V-day - Vaffanculo Day - was a day of protest against the corruption and general incompetence of Italian politicians across the board.

[pigro]

let me get this straight ... an election where you have to PAY to vote? Ok, so it's an internal election within one party, but I wonder if it's the thin end of the wedge? General election turnout (in the UK) has already dropped from 76% in 1979 to a dismal 61% in 2005 ... Can you imagine what it would be if you were charged when you went to the polling station?

You have to laugh indeed, to avoid crying.