sentences:  In the 1999 European Parliament election the Bonino List, thanks to its standard-bearer's popularity and a massive use of commercials, won a surprisingly high 8.5% of the vote and 7 MEPs (Emma Bonino, Marco Pannella, Benedetto Della Vedova, Marco Cappato, Olivier Dupuis, Maurizio Turco and Gianfranco Dell'Alba), thus becoming the fourth largest party in the country by European representation.The MEPs co-founded the short-lived Technical Group of Independents.The list, which gathered the support of disgruntled voters, women and young people, did particularly well in Northern Italy (13.2% in Piedmont, 13.0% in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, 11.9% in Veneto, 11.6% in Lombardy, 10.8% in Liguria), where its proposed libertarian policies were very popular, especially among disappointed Lega Nord's supporters, while it did fairly worse in the conservative and statist South (below 4% in Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily).