The VIII Legislature of the Regional Council of Veneto, the legislative assembly of Veneto, was inaugurated in April 2005, following the 2005 regional election, and ended in April 2010. Of the 60 members, 47 were elected in provincial constituencies with proportional representation with a further 12 returned from the so-called "regional list" of the elected President of Veneto, including the President himself, and the candidate for president who came second.[1]
Thirteen parties were represented in the Council at the beginning of the term. They became fourteen when Massimo Carraro, the defeated candidate for President of the centre-left, resigned and was replaced by a regional deputy elected from the list of Italy of Values, thanks to an obscure clause of the electoral law.
The single largest party in the Council was Forza Italia, followed by Liga Veneta until February 2007, when the members of Democracy is Freedom – The Daisy (7 regional deputies) and the Democrats of the Left (5 regional deputies) formed a joint-group, the "Olive Tree – Venetian Democratic Party", named after the future Italian Democratic Party, which was founded later in October. It was the first time in Italy that the name of the future party was used in an institutional contest.
The regional election that produced the VIII Legislature took place on 3–4 April 2005. Giancarlo Galan (Forza Italia, House of Freedoms) was re-elected for the third time president of the region, but the support for him was diminished by the presence of a third candidate, Giorgio Panto, who picked votes both from the centre-right camp and from the Ventist one, and of a fourth candidate of the far-right.
Forza Italia suffered a decline in term of votes and regional deputies, although remaining the largest party in the council and also in the region as a whole (the Olive Tree was only an electoral alliance at the time and the three parties which were part of it formed separate groups in the council), while Venetist parties had a very good result: the combined score of Liga Veneta (14.7%), North-East Project (5.4%) and Liga Fronte Veneto (1.2%) was 21.3%, up from the 15.6% of 2000 (Liga Veneta 12.0%, Veneti d'Europa 2.4% and Fronte Marco Polo 1.2%.
^"Archived copy"(PDF). www.consiglio.regione.lombardia.it. Archived from the original(PDF) on 6 March 2009. Retrieved 22 May 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
