NPR Story on Upcoming Italian Elections

As I’ve mentioned, I’m going to be in Italy for the next six weeks, during which there is likely to be lots of campaigning for the upcoming April election. I keep reading articles I find about the election, but the whole process still kind of eludes me. I get it on a grand scale, from the 35,000-foot viewpoint, but the closer I get the more confusing it becomes.

At any rate, the very excellent Sylvia Poggioli had a good story on NPR this morning talking about the elections – she’s particularly focused on the two men who are vying for the position of Prime Minister of Italy. One of them, the right-wing Silvio Berlusconi, has been the PM before and is a relatively known quantity even outside of Italy. The other, the center-left candidate Walter Veltroni, is the popular former mayor of Rome and seems almost the polar opposite of Berlusconi. Veltroni is trying to position himself as the Barack Obama of Italian politics, even going so far as using Obama’s signature slogan, “Yes we can.”

Check out the NPR story, and you can even listen to it while you’re doing other things (since I know there are some among you who, like me, can’t stand to not multi-task).