Fumata bianca! At five minutes to 1 p.m. today, on the fourth round of voting, ballots in favor of Giorgio Napolitano reached the one-vote majority needed to elect him President of the Republic.

It was not a win that bodes well for Italy. The final count of votes for Napolitano was 543, only two more than the Unione’s majority of 541 in the assembly. In other words, there were virtually no cross-over votes from the Casa delle libertà. Mistakes were made on both sides. Commentators are already saying that Napolitano is President of half of Italy.

The total number of voters was actually 1,009, not 1,010 as previously stated, because one of the senators of Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s lawyer Cesare Previti was sent to prison last week for corrupting a judge. They say don’t shoot the messenger, but both the corrupted judge and the man on whose behalf the judge was corrupted—guess who—got off.

The way the past two days’ voting went was odd to say the least. Though he turned out to be their one and only candidate (and not a stalking horse for Massimo D’Alema as many feared), the Unione opted not to vote Napolitano’s name but to cast blank ballots for the first three rounds (in which a two thirds majority was called for). The subtleties of this parliamentary tactic for the moment escape me (though I am looking for someone to explain it). More comprehensible was the Casa delle libertà’s decision to cast blank ballots in the fourth round (the first in which a simple majority would suffice). They had little or no chance of electing an alternative candidate.

The tried in the first ballot, writing in the name of Gianni Letta, but he barely got a third of the votes. Then they tried the “Divide and rule” tactic, proposing what they called a “rose” of names that they hoped would split the rival center-left vote: Franco Marini, the recently nominated speaker of the Senate, former socialist prime minister Giuliano Amato, European Commissioner Mario Monti and former prime minister Lamberto Dini. The center left refrained from choosing, reaffirming their one candidate Napolitano.

There was in fact no horse-trading, just the old “wall against wall”, neither side making any concessions. This was a pity, since it aggravated the pre-existing polarisation. There were elements of the center-right, Casini’s UDC and Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale who seemed willing to deal. Casini in fact publicly deplored the stance of the Casa delle libertà he belongs to. But the stubborn refusal of Umberto Bossi’s Lega won the day. Berlusconi vowed he would never, never, never vote for an ex-Communist, not even for a right-wing (so to speak) former Communist reformer like Napolitano, now safely institutionalized as a senatore a vita.

The fact is that for Berlusconi, despite his proposing a German-style grand coalition the day after he lost the elections, reconciliation with the center left and the good governance of Italy are less important than hanging on for dear life to the votes of his half of the country. More important to him, it seems, than the bipartisan election of a President of the Republic is not alienating his electorate by supporting a candidate from the left. Berlusconi has his eye on the upcoming referendum on the constitutional reforms proposed by his government, to be held on June 25-26. The constitutional experts I read unanimously agree that the proposed changes—what goes by the English designation of “devolution” (the pet project of the Lega) coupled with an expansion of the powers of the prime minister--would be nothing short of a disaster. The referendum, in which voters are asked to confirm the laws already voted on by the parliament, will be carried by a simple majority.