Italy: Dangers of an Inadequate Electoral System

The political campaign that will culminate in the election of a new Italian legislative and executive on February 24-25 has not been about programs and reforms. As tax fraud and mafia are crippling the country’s capacity to rebound, political candidates have entertained the electorate in a farce centered on squabbles and spites. Even though the scarcity of concrete ideas among the ruling class is key to this situation, Italy’s flawed electoral system has made it easier for politicians to stage this show.
The current proportional representation system, which transforms district votes into a national scale and allocates 55 percent of the seats in the deputies’ chamber to the winning coalition, is the perfect condition for politicians who are more attracted to the parliamentary payroll than to their civic duty to pursue their personal interests. As big parties form ever-larger coalitions to hoard votes, smaller ones are desperately trying to pass the threshold in an effort to establish a more or less effective minority tyranny. This race to the seat of power explains the electoral game of alleged post-electoral accords and under-the-counter interparty negotiations, the result of which will likely be another round of gridlock.
To further complicate this situation is the fact that the majority in the senate may not come from the same party as the executive. This is because the race to the senate follows different rules than the ones applied to the lower chambers. Seats are allocated on a regional basis, not a national one. Even the districts for the senate elections are different in size and number from the ones used to elect the deputies. The consequence of this is parties placing their most popular members in regions that are crucial to gain the majority in the senate. Such a mechanism also leads to a high risk of cohabitation, which is extremely threatening to the stability of the cabinet, dismissible through a vote of no confidence.
It is no surprise the very minister who reformed the electoral system in 2005 later referred to his law as “junk.” As candidates turned into showmen using media to exploit the intricacies of the electoral system to their own advantage, the democratic rights of the citizens were left behind as an afterthought. Italians who will cast their ballots in the next days know very little about the programmatic intentions of our leaders and much less about what their vote will actually entail amidst the incomprehensible electoral mechanism.
Still because of the current system, the voters do not even have the right to express preference for a particular candidate within a list, since parties present “blocked” lists in each electoral district. In other words, the ballot paper will contain a pre-made, unchangeable, district-based list for each party. Not only does this mechanism heavily limit democratic representativeness, but it also reduces the need for a genuine political debate. In the context of a very institutionalized party system, why would leaders spend energy on flashing out clear-cut programs when in any case the voter does not have that much of a choice?
The Italian case shows how much constitutional design affects the degree and effectiveness of political debate. In Italy, the law itself has made political confrontation needless, thus turning the electoral campaign into a race for votes with no programmatic background. Whoever will be elected next week will be faced with a crucial dilemma; changing the same absurd electoral law that brought them to power. This reform is something that a democratic government owes to its citizens.