FACTOID #151: The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are also the five countries whose citizens trust one another the most. Coincidence? Probably.
Encyclopedia > European Parliament Election, 2004 (Italy)
Elections to the European Parliament were held in Italy on June 13, 2004. Italy's highly fragmented party system made it hard to identify an overall trend, but the results were generally seen as a defeat for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and a victory for the centre-left opposition coalition identified with Romano Prodi, who is currently President of the European Commission but is widely expected to re-enter Italian politics at the next election.
¹ United in the Olive Tree included Michl Ebner of the SVP in their list of elected candidates under a pre-electoral arrangement.
Seats
Seats are allocated to party lists on a national basis using an electoral quota, with the residue given to the lists with the largest excess over whole quotas. An electoral quota is then calculated for each list and used to allocate seats to each list in each of the five electoral regions.
Northern Italy, made up largely of a vast plain that is contained by the Alps in the north and drained by the Po River and its tributaries, comprises the regions of Liguria, Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta (see Aosta, Valle d’), Lombardy, Trentino–Alto Adige, Venetia, Friuli–Venezia Giulia, and part of Emilia-Romagna (which extends into central Italy).
The Magyars plundered N Italy, and in the south the Arabs seized (917) Sicily and raided the mainland.
In central and N Italy, the prevailing chaos was increased by the conflict between the emperors and the popes over investiture and by the contested succession to Tuscany after the death (1115) of Countess Matilda.
The universal acceptance of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern democracies is in sharp contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where elections were considered an oligarchic institution and where most political offices were filled using allotment / sortition.
In the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections almost all of the reformist candidates were ruled unfit by the Guardian Council of religious leaders.
In order for democratic elections to be fair and competitive, opposition parties and candidates must enjoy the rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and movement as necessary to voice their criticisms of the government openly and to bring alternative policies and candidates to the voters.
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