Italy, at the start of June 2017, could be described as living through a period of apprehension and uncertainty on the one hand combined with more positive developments, and therefore reasons for optimism, on the other. The apprehension and uncertainty arose from the electoral law.
As we were going to press, it looked as though Parliament might shortly approve a new voting system and thereby lower the odds on elections taking place before the end of the year. The system had been a matter of contention for years. What was novel about the current proposal now being debated was the way it had come about, and its substance. Thanks to the weakness of the political parties and their interlocking vetoes, the electoral laws in force for various periods of time from 2005 had either been passed by simple majorities, without the kind of cross-party consensus one might have expected for such measures (this was the case of the Porcellum and the Italicum); or else they had been the product of Constitutional Court judgements (giving rise, in January 2014, to the Consultellum, in force until 1 July 2016, and, in January of this year, to a revised Consultellum for the Chamber of Deputies).
As things currently stand, the best placed list achieving at least 40% of the vote in the Chamber of Deputies contest is awarded a majority premium giving it an automatic seat majority; and in the event of no list achieving 40%, seats are distributed proportionally among the lists winning at least 3%. In the case of the Senate, there is no majority premium. Seats are distributed proportionally, within regions, to lists winning at least 8% of the regional vote share or at least 3% if they are fielded as part of an electoral coalition with at least 20%.
In essence, the arrangements are the residue of the long series of attempts at institutional reform, and efforts to resist specific reforms, analysed by Paul Blokker in this issue; and they have given rise to the deliberations that have produced the proposal currently on the table because of concerns about their compatibility in a context of symmetric bicameralism. As Blokker notes, the parties in recent years had converged upon a majoritarian or partisan approach to institutional reform; so the cross-party agreement underpinning the current proposal is rather striking. It is the more striking for including the Five-star Movement (M5S) which, as the analysis of Davide Vittori in this issue confirms, is a populist catch-all party. As such, it has traditionally eschewed any kind of alliance or association with the more established, mainstream parties, tarring them all with the same brush and fearful that leaning to the left or right risked it losing some greater or lesser proportion of its supporters. And yet here it is apparently ready to join forces with the Democratic Party, Forza Italia and the Northern League in the passage of a new electoral law. How is this novel degree of cross-party cooperation to be explained?
To answer this question we have to present the broad outlines of the proposal. For the Chamber of Deputies, the country is divided into 28 constituencies and these into 225 single-member electoral colleges. Consequently, parties present both lists of candidates for each constituency and a candidate for each of the colleges. The voter has one vote which s/he uses to choose a party. Votes are first aggregated at the national level and parties with less than 5% excluded. Seats are then assigned to parties proportionally with the first candidates to obtain seats being those with the most votes in each of the electoral colleges. If a party is entitled to more seats than those already obtained in the colleges, then a variable number of its list candidates are elected depending on the number of votes it has obtained in each constituency. For the Senate, the system is essentially the same except that the place of the 28 constituencies is taken by the twenty regions, which are divided into 115 single-member colleges, and the aggregation of votes takes place at regional, rather than at national level.
In essence, the proposed system is a system of list PR. So the reason it was able to aggregate the support of the four largest parties was presumably that it brought no particular disadvantages to any of them – which was in a sense an advantage to all of them given that the timing, in the final year of the legislature, put them under pressure to agree some kind of workable system for the next election. And the 5% threshold would allow them to exclude the smaller parties.
With the new electoral system agreed, the parties could then get on and squabble over the date of the elections. The M5S used the demand for early elections to carry on with their anti-political campaigning, claiming that mainstream politicians were resisting the demand for reasons entirely connected with a squalid desire to maximise their parliamentary pensions. It was perhaps understandable that Matteo Renzi, re-elected Democratic Party leader in April, wanted elections only after the annual finance bill had been passed in the autumn: the PD had taken a narrow lead in the opinion polls, and unemployment was falling.
There were additional features of the political scene to feel positive about. Discussion of the electoral-law proposal was inevitably accompanied by speculation about its likely consequences, given current poll ratings, including suggestions that the votes of Italians resident abroad would, as in 2006, be decisive for government formation. As Rossana Sampugnaro’s contribution makes clear, although the quality of representation provided by parliamentarians representing the foreign constituency has often been the subject of caricature, the situation is more complex than the caricatures warrant. And despite their shortcomings, Italy’s arrangements for expatriate voting place her among the most advanced countries in dealing with the widening gap between citizenship and residence in a world of massively increased transnational mobility. Italy’s place in the world was meanwhile contributing to other positive changes such those connected to the justice system. As Daniela Piana notes, in her contribution, while the quality of justice in Italy has traditionally been the subject of fierce criticism from many quarters, the influence of external actors relying on soft law, combined with initiatives from below, is bringing significant changes. One might even refer to them as a ‘silent revolution’ in standards in Italian justice.
Finally, as so-called terrorist incidents elsewhere in Europe were gaining a heightened profile in early June, it was significant that Italy remained relatively free of them, something that could perhaps in part be attributed to the nature of Italian foreign policy (IFP) here analysed by Dessì and Olmastroni in their article on the foreign and defence policy of the Renzi government. Inspired by liberal internationalism, IFP has long been pursued through the search for cooperation and agreement in international negotiating fora; and a significant recent feature of IFP has been the refusal to engage in offensive military operations in Iraq and Syria, while the Government has not shied away from enhancing its contribution to multilateral action in a number of important theatres.
In mid-2017, then, the Italian political system appeared, as it so often does, to be standing at something of a cross-roads. Despite some apocalyptic predictions, the previous autumn, of what would happen in the event of a ‘No’ victory in the December referendum, the country had a stable government with a more or less secure majority presiding over – albeit slow – processes of economic and social improvement. At the same time she faced the grande incognita associated with elections looming on a foggy horizon. By the time we come to write the editorial for the next issue of the journal, hopefully some of the fog will have cleared.