Democratic Party (Italy) leadership election, 2007
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
None
The 2007 Democratic Party leadership election was held on 14 October 2007 in order to elect the first leader of the Democratic Party, the largest political party in Italy at the time. The election was conducted as an open primary, with all Italian citizens aged at least 16 and non-Italian legal residents being eligible to vote. A minimum fee of one euro (initially chosen as five euros, lowered to one euro following direct requests by almost all leadership candidates) was requested to voters in order to taker part in the election.
The election, attended by over three and a half million voters, ended in a landslide victory for Walter Veltroni, Mayor of Rome and former leader of the Democrats of the Left, who gained 75.8% of the vote, being thus elected as first Democratic Party leader.
Following the national conventions of the Democrats of the Left (DS) and Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy (DL), Romano Prodi announced a list of 45 politicians which would have composed the Organising Committee of the Democratic Party. All members successively met on 18 June 2007 in order to decide the rules regarding the election of the first leader and the 2,400 members of the Constituting Assembly. A method was chosen in order to associate lists with leadership candidates. In order to run into the election, a number of 100 signatures were needed, whereas at least 2,000 approved signatures were requested to run into the leadership race.
30 July 2007 was the deadline for presenting leadership candidacies. All candidates were requested to be clearly associated with the Democratic Party project, as either members of the political subjects forming it or with no party association at all.
On the 30 July deadline, a total of eleven candidates officially registered their candidacy: Walter Veltroni, Rosy Bindi, Enrico Letta, Furio Colombo, Marco Pannella, Antonio Di Pietro, Mario Adinolfi, Pier Giorgio Gawronski, Jacopo G. Schettini, Lucio Cangini and Amerigo Rutigliano. Of these, Pannella and Di Pietro were stopped because of their involvement in external parties, whereas Cangini and Rutigliano did not manage to present the necessary 2,000 valid signatures for the 9pm deadline, and Colombo's candidacy was instead made into hiatus in order to give him 48 additional hours to integrate the required documentation; Colombo later decided to retire his candidacy citing his impossibility to fit with all the requirements. All rejected candidates had the chance against the decision in 48 hours' time, with Pannella and Rutigliano being the only two candidates to appeal against it. Both were rejected on 3 August.
...
Wikipedia