Now that the two chambers of Parliament have been dissolved and the election called for the 13th and 14th April, we can expect more polling to be carried out. There have been five vote intention polls published on www.sondaggipoliticoelettorali.it/ since the beginning of January. They do indeed show a big lead for Berlusconi, as has been reported elsewhere. Polls for the lower chamber, with a (very slight) rolling average are plotted below.

The graphs are plotted on the assumption that:

• the parties of the centre-right will form a single list, including the UDC, AN, FI, LN, Storace’s Destra, the Nuovo PSI, the nuovo DC, and Fiamma Tricolore
• the Partito Democratico will join with the Radicali and the Social Democrats to form a small centre-left list
• The Sinistra Democratica, Verdi, Rif. Comm, and Comunisti Italiani will run together as the Sinistra Arcobaleno

The paucity of polls so far means that the rolling means are virtually useless. Hopefully, though, more polls will be forthcoming – although the general quality of the polling seems quite poor. In one recent poll, SWG asked voters how they would vote in eight different scenarios (four each in the Camera and in the Senate). Are such hypothetical votes reliable?

What do these vote shares mean for parliamentary seats? Well, in the lower chamber it’s quite simple: barring an astonishing surge in support for the Partito Democratico, the centre-right will win a majority of 340 seats, thanks to the bonus given to the largest coalition. As for the Senate, it’s not so clear. The same poll that asked voters to choose under eight different scenarios also projected seat shares in the Senate. Given the scenario I’ve used above, and given the vote shares they report (which differ slightly from the Camera ones due to the slightly higher voting age), they claim that the centre-right will win 176/315 (55.8%) of the seats in the Senate – a more comfortable majority even than in the Camera.

How this was calculated, I don’t know – there are no 2006 figures for the two left-wing groupings from which one can extrapolate. However, it’s fairly obvious that, if the centre-left is divided in all twenty regions, the centre-right will then win the seat bonus for each region – save possibly in four or five particularly red regions.