Dear Editor,
in Italy there is great confusion under the sky, but – unlike Mao Zedong’s China – the situation is anything but excellent. In fact, at this moment it would be more accurate to define it as great chaos: parliamentary, political, institutional. The rejection of the amendment on preferences is the result of a majority on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which began with the defeat in the referendum on the judiciary reform. Perhaps then Giorgia Meloni should have had the courage to call Italians to the polls. But, as they say, what’s done is done.
The debate on electoral laws has long been manipulated and biased. It is not mandatory to know who won on the very night of the elections. In no democratic political system that has ever existed have electoral laws ever elected the government. Nowhere in the world have the drafters of any electoral law ever worried about the possibility of a tie.
The obligation to declare, at the time of presenting parties and coalitions, the name of the respective candidate for Prime Minister, beyond the tactical objective of putting the current opposition in difficulty, contributes to fueling the personalistic drift of Italian politics. Opposing the people (demos) to the rules (nomos) is, notoriously, one of the favorite practices of populists, both right and left.
The so-called governability, if correctly understood as a virtuous combination of political stability and decisional effectiveness, never derives from an electoral law, but rather from the political culture of the parties, the composition of coalitions, and the quality of leadership.
The “Stabilicum” under discussion in the Chamber belongs to the category of proportional electoral laws with a majority bonus. In this category are the Acerbo law (1923), the “fraud law” (1953), the Calderoli law (2005), and the Renzi-Boschi law (2016). Models difficult to admire.
Dear Editor,
Alessandro Manzoni said that “not always what comes after is progress.” He was right. In this sense, after more than a very disappointing thirty years of “bastard” majoritarianism, progress would be to return to what was there before: pure proportional representation, but this time with a five percent threshold.
