Berlusconi candidates miss election deadline after official goes for sandwich

By Nick Squires in Rome Published: 7:12PM GMT 01 Mar 2010

Berlusconi possibilities have been barred from station in consequential informal elections Photo: REUTERS

The annoying fumble happened at the week end when the budding minister"s People of Freedom Party (PdL) had to contention the list of possibilities for the key segment of Lazio, that includes Rome.

The supporter entrusted with the charge longed for the midday deadline and was barred from submitting the list by electoral officers, who were corroborated up by police.

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Mr Berlusconi was pronounced to have been "furious" at the mistake, that could palm feat to the Left-wing antithesis in one of Italy"s majority critical regions.

The celebration workman who longed for the deadline, Alfredo Milioni, pronounced he had incited up at the electoral bureau in Rome at around 11.30am on Saturday. He pronounced that whilst watchful in line he had "taken the event to go and get a panini".

But as the row strong over just how the slip-up was authorised to occur yesterday, Mr Milioni, a former train driver, afterwards altered his story multiform times.

He pronounced he had left the reserve in sequence to pick up a little electoral papers, afterwards after claimed that he had popped out for a couple of mins "because my daughter was watchful in the car and she had a fever".

Party chiefs gave nonetheless an additional reason that he had been dreaming by an evidence with a part of of an additional party.

By the time Mr Milioni returned to the bureau at around 12.15pm, he was told the deadline for registration had expired.

The celebration appealed opposite the preference on Sunday, but it was deserted by a court.

The PdL"s claimant for administrator in Lazio, Renata Polverini, has called on Italy"s president, Giorgio Napolitano, to meddle in the dispute.

"I spoke to the budding apportion and he was intensely nonplussed by what happened," pronounced Ms Polverini, who is contesting a chair that has been left empty given the centre-Left obligatory was forced to renounce over a sex liaison involving drug and Brazilian transsexual prostitutes.

The celebration plans to have a second justice appeal, but if that as well is dismissed, afterwards Lazio"s 2.3 million electorate will not be means to opinion for Mr Berlusconi"s centre-Right coalition.

The elections, to be hold in thirteen of Italy"s twenty regions on Mar 28-29, are a key exam of the 73-year-old leader"s recognition after a vehement twelve months in that he has been concerned in dual crime trials, physically pounded at a domestic convene in Milan, sued for divorce by his mother of twenty years and indicted of sleeping with a prostitute oneself at his palazzo in Rome.

Mr Berlusconi has boasted that underneath his stewardship, Italy avoided the misfortune of the tellurian mercantile crisis.

But total expelled on Monday showed that the stagnation rate had increasing to 8.6 per cent in January, the top turn given Jan 2004.