Down, but not out

摘要

SO FRAGILE is Italian politics that the biggest news from parliament in months is the survival of the government. On October 14th Silvio Berlusconi won a confidence vote by 316 votes to 301. But the outcome was a lot tighter than those numbers suggest. To win convincingly, the prime minister needed an outright majority. Since the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian parliament, has 630 members, Mr Berlusconi scraped over that bar by a single vote.