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LONDON, May 4 () -- The Conservative Party candidate Boris Johnson has been re-elected the mayor of London, according to election results announced Friday.Johnson defended his position as mayor of the British capital city against challenges from six other contenders.Johnson was first elected London mayor in 2008 and his victory gives him four more years in City Hall, next to the River Thames within a stone's throw of the iconic Tower Bridge.Johnson defied the political tide, which was running strongly against the Conservative Party in municipal elections held on Thursday across England, Wales, and Scotland.Johnson won 1,054,811 votes, beating his main rival -- the Labour Party's Ken Livingstone, who polled 992,273 votes. In 2008, Johnson beat Livingstone, then the sitting mayor for eight years, with 1,168,738 votes to 1,028,274 votes.After his victory, Johnson told supporters, members of the public, officials, and the media gathered at City Hall, "Visitors to the city will now find a city with Olympic and Paralympic venues completed on time, and under budget. I will continue to fight for a good deal for Londoners, a good deal from the government that will help us deliver prosperity for everybody in this city."Livingstone said, "The real story tonight is that Labour has won in every part of the country. I want to congratulate Boris on his personal victory, not only have you won a second term but I suspect this has helped settle the question of the next Tory leadership election."The electoral battle was a close one, with the result still uncertain as the votes in the 14th and final of London's electoral districts were counted.Technical problems with the electronic counting system used to count the votes, including a power failure at one of the three vote counting centers, meant the result was delayed late into the evening.The voting system is called supplementary vote; each elector gets a first preference vote and a second preference vote. If the highest polling candidate does not reach 50 percent in the first round of counting, then all but the top two candidates are eliminated from the race and their second preferences are distributed to the top two candidates.This means that after all the votes have been counted the first- and second-placed candidates have much larger totals than the other candidates.In third place was Jenny Jones, of the Green Party with 98,913, significantly pushing Brian Paddick of the Liberal Democrats, the third party of British politics and the junior partner in the national coalition government, into fourth place on 91,774 votes.Johnson's victory is the only happy moment for prime minister David Cameron's Conservative Party out of the whole series of elections on Thursday, which involved 30 million voters. Voters punished his Conservative Party, and the junior party in the coalition government the Liberal Democrats, for two years of austerity budgets, cutbacks, rising unemployment and a return to recession.The Conservatives saw their share of the vote fall from 36.1 percent at the inconclusive general election in May, 2010 to 31 percent.The Liberal Democrats, who were out of government for nearly 67 years from 1945 to 2010 and which often attracted protest votes from voters unhappy with both the larger parties, suffered a slip to 16 percent from the 23 percent they polled at the election.The main opposition Labour Party saw its vote rise to 38 percent, up from the general election figure of 29 percent.Johnsons most noteworthy initiatives in the four years he has held the office of London mayor have been few. He introduced a bicycle hire scheme on to London streets, an idea copied from a French city.He also sent a fleet of unpopular buses into early retirement while replacing them with an updated version of the popular and iconic Routemaster bus axed by his predecessor Livingstone because their 60-year-old design lacked disabled access.He has championed London as a global city, and campaigned for improved transport links both within Britain but especially abroad in a bid to bolster its status as one of the major centers for global finance.He has thrown his support behind an ambitious plan for a third major London airport to be built in the Thames estuary east of London, and has said this is essential if the city is to continue to stay ahead of continental rivals such as Paris or keep abreast of global peers such as New York and Hong Kong.Johnson now has the largest personal mandate of any elected politician in Britain, and members of his party who are disenchanted with the coalition government and with prime minister Cameron are quick to point out his success at the polls, which has defied his party's current electoral failure.The London Olympic and Paralympic Games in July, August, and September, will put Johnson at the center of an international stage, and his verbal cleverness, sense of humor, and his unconventional approach will attract the attention of a much larger audience.At the same time as 5.8 million Londoners had the chance to vote for the mayor, they also voted for the London Assembly, a small 'parliament' which holds the London mayor to account, and can also change his budget if enough support is gathered.Londoners voted in two elections for the Assembly -- one election for their local district representative for each of the areas of London, and the other election Assembly members chosen from political party lists; the more votes a party gets, the more of its list get elected. These two elections were much more favorable for the Labour Party, demonstrating Johnson's political achievement in winning the mayoral election.In the election for the 14 district representatives to the London Assembly, Labour gained two seats from the Conservatives to take eight seats.
by Marzia De GiuliMILAN, Italy, Dec. 29 () -- As Prime Minister Mario Monti starts a new phase of his action plan, international markets are challenging Italy, the third largest eurozone economy struggling to warn off a dramatic deepening of its debt-driven crisis by trying to revitalize its economic growth.Monti's cabinet of technocrats has just launched what he named the "grow phase" of its austerity plan after a first 30-billion-euro (38-billion-U.S. dollars) package won final approval in parliament last week.The new phase will focus on measures aimed at stimulating growth and competitiveness that will include a reform of the labor market, liberalizations and structural changes in Italy's obsolete infrastructures.However, despite having trended lower in the past weeks, the yields on the Italian government bonds have showed to be still unsustainably high recently. On Thursday, Italy sold seven billion euros (nine billion U.S. dollars) three- seven- and 10-year bonds at lower yields than in recent sales. But the demand was weaker than expected and the interest rates still too high, Francesco Previtera, the head of research of Milan-based Banca Akros ESN, noted.Nervousness in the international markets was mainly caused by lack of liquidity as "most of the funds provided to banks by the European Central Bank (ECB) in the past days have not been put into use yet," he told .As the sale of Italy's debt was a test on the market, it put pressure on the euro that, after the Italian auction, fell 0.3 percent against the U.S. dollar, coming close to its year low of 1.2871 U.S. dollars experienced last January, he added.The market turmoil is caused by the eurozone instability, which is itself closely linked to the Italian difficult financial situation, Monti outlined in his end-of-year address on Thursday, but he is confident that the austerity measures will save Italy from a total "collapse".According to local experts, if such measures are a necessary first step, and also assumed that thanks to these Italy will manage to balance its budget by 2013, the crucial problem remains slow productivity growth.In fact, the package will surely hit growth in the short term by reducing the domestic demand, as it adds new taxes to the already extremely high Italians' burden (over 45 percent of gross domestic product).The Italian banking association (ABI) has indicated that the third eurozone economy is expected to contract by 0.7 percent in 2012."But these previsions are still quite positive compared to a possible 1.6-percent drop of the GDP forecast by Italy's leading industrial association Confindustria,"an economics professor at Milan Bocconi University, Marco Onado, told ."Italy's situation is still quite worrying, and the only effective remedy is growth," he said adding his best wish for Monti's government is he will be able to overcome the powerful interest-group resistance that has opposed to structural reforms in the past.Special Report: Global Financial Crisis
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