But still it moves

To most Europeans,the result in Italy must have seemed bewildering. For a month Silvio Berlusconi has been enmeshed in a sex scandal....

To most Europeans,the result in Italy must have seemed bewildering. For a month Silvio Berlusconi has been enmeshed in a sex scandal that might have forced any other leader from office. The day before the vote,it became spicier. El País,a Spanish newspaper,published photographs impounded in Italy showing unidentified topless beauties by the pool at Mr Berlusconis Sardinian villa and a naked Mirek Topolanek,a former Czech prime minister. Yet Mr Berlusconis People of Freedom PdL still emerged with 35.3 per cent of the vote,nine points ahead of the opposition Democratic Party PD.

After the attacks he has suffered,no other politician in the world would have achieved this result, declared Ignazio La Russa,a PdL official. Yet most Italian commentators judged the outcome a defeat for Mr Berlusconi. The PdLs share of the vote on its first outing as a unified party was two points lower than at the 2008 general election,when it was mainly an electoral alliance. And it fell short of expectations. Mr Berlusconi had claimed overwhelming personal support-over 70 per cent,he said. He gave a troubling impression that his popularity justified limiting the checks and balances typical of a democracy. The result brought him back to earth,reminding him that Italians vote PdL for more complex reasons than blind love of its leader.

His partys tally fell well short of his associates target of 40 per cent,let alone Mr Berlusconis own aspiration of 45 per cent. The prime minister put himself top of the candidate list and was reportedly expecting 3m-4m preference votes. That he received 2.7m was a personal setback,as was the fact that the PdL did better in local elections held at the same time. Where did its votes go? Certainly not to the PD,which missed its own 27 per cent target. The stridently anti-Berlusconi Italy of Principles party,on the other hand,doubled its share,to 8 per cent.

In the south Mr Berlusconis party suffered from abstentions. Elsewhere the PdL lost votes to its coalition ally,the Northern League,which is emerging as the party of Italys rednecks. It won over 10 per cent of the vote and may now hold greater sway over the government. On June 9th Mr Berlusconi gave the league a concession by dropping an electoral reform that would have made it harder for the league to hold future governments to ransom.

Did the outcome show that the electorate cares about politicians private lives? Up to a point. But the fact that the PdL suffered from abstention in the traditionally macho south implies that much of the discontent was caused by recession. Mr Berlusconi has so far spent most of his energy on two issues: law and order and institutional reform. It is high time he switched his attention to the economy.

The EconomistNewspaper Limited 2009