Vote to rebel against the Paludellum

The debate on electoral law is one of those classic topics against which one can gauge, with a fair degree of accuracy, the vast gulf that can exist between the political class’s interest in an issue and the public’s interest in that very same issue. Traditionally, those in the know get all worked up about electoral law, whilst the rest of the electorate usually dozes off. But despite this – and we, of course, are among those who would like to doze off but cannot – the debate on electoral law deserves to be highlighted for reasons that are not only technical but also political and even psychological. The twists and turns of recent days – in a sense, with the famous amendment on preferential votes, over which the government saw the stability of its majority waver for a few moments – serve to remind us just how much discussions on electoral law can help even voters with little interest in electoral systems to understand a little more about the identities, difficulties, hypocrisies, strategies, tactics, vices and virtues of the Italian political class. And even during this parliamentary process – last Tuesday’s session and today’s, with the Chamber of Deputies set to vote by secret ballot on the remainder of the electoral law – we can attempt to use the scenes we have witnessed and will witness as a litmus test of the balance of power between the majority and the opposition, including the many things left unsaid.

The festival of hypocrisy surrounding the electoral law comprises many scenes. The most romantic scene is that of those who genuinely believe there was someone in Parliament keen to introduce preferential voting: saying you want to let voters choose is one thing – and Meloni can claim to have tried – but actually wanting to do so is quite another, because no party, not even the one led by Meloni, is keen to take power away from party leaderships by giving up the closed lists that allow the parties themselves to decide in advance who will enter Parliament and who will not. The most heart-wrenching scene is that of a section of the opposition choosing to turn the scuppering of a measure – the introduction of preferential voting, which the opposition itself claimed to want – into a symbol of strategic victory. In this farcical spectacle of hypocrisy, there are other scenes that are also worth mentioning.

There are moving scenes of Vannaccia’s supporters who, claiming to have voted according to their preferences, accuse the right of being made up of traitors – all from the vantage point of the very betrayal just perpetrated by Vannaccia’s supporters themselves, who created a party by first betraying the League and then the government as well, to which they no longer grant a vote of confidence. And there’s more. Among the noteworthy scenes are also the fiery words coming from the Democratic Party against the new electoral law, which, barring any surprises, is expected to be passed today in the Chamber of Deputies. An electoral law that the PD, led by Elly Schlein, claims it does not want, and which it considers a fascist move to approve without the opposition’s involvement, but which the faction within the PD closest to Schlein is evidently eager to utilise, given a specific provision within the new electoral law. This provision, by requiring coalitions to nominate a joint candidate for Prime Minister before the vote, would allow Elly Schlein the chance to be put forward as a single candidate for Prime Minister ahead of the elections: with primaries, without primaries – who knows. So, at this circus of hypocrisy, Schlein has to say that the law Meloni is working on is unacceptable, but in truth Schlein’s PD knows that under this electoral law, Schlein has a slightly better chance of competing for the premiership than under the current electoral law.

The broader political spectrum, apart from Schlein, fears the new electoral law because it knows that under this law, it would have to accept the responsibility of being a coalition and set aside any attempt to act as a coalition on even-numbered days whilst being at odds on odd-numbered days: it is one thing to stand together in single-member constituencies, as the current law allows, and then be able to split up after the vote; it is quite another to declare oneself, before the elections, a unified political coalition, with a common candidate and seeking to secure a majority bonus. To this carnival of hypocrisy, a further detail must be added: if the PD states that it does not under any circumstances wish to find itself having to deal with a deadlock or a tie, then to have a little more certainty of avoiding that possibility, it should be happy to have an electoral law that provides for a majority bonus awarding 70 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 35 in the Senate to the coalition that exceeds 42 per cent and comes first in both houses of Parliament. In 2022, when the right won, it secured many parliamentary seats – more than the centre-left – partly because the division among its opponents greatly amplified its victory, handing it the overwhelming majority of the single-member constituencies provided for under the current electoral law. To this carnival of hypocrisy, of course, we must also add a few significant points concerning relations between the majority’s allies, with Forza Italia willing to do anything to scupper the electoral law, because for Forza Italia, having an electoral law – such as the current one – that protects even the losers, without letting them lose too badly, would be an infinitely preferable scenario to one in which there were a clear winner and a clear loser: heaven forbid that FI should end up in opposition. But perhaps the most interesting and important element, speaking of hypocrisy, concerns the ‘quagmire’ – a term invoked by Meloni two days ago to describe what has stalled the process of preference voting: the quagmire.

The quagmire – the amendment on which the majority was defeated – does, of course, exist, even though it could already be resolved today with the vote in the Chamber of Deputies on the new electoral law. But the quagmire, in many respects, is the situation in which the majority has found itself since the day after the defeat of the constitutional referendum in March. And if we were to take Meloni’s words seriously, we could say – as this newspaper has been repeating for months – that the only way to prevent Italy from having to live with its boots in the quagmire is to swiftly pass the electoral law, provided that is possible; to bring forward the Budget Bill to September; to reach 4 September, the day on which the Meloni government will become the longest-serving in history, and hold an election swiftly – not least to prevent today’s gnats in the swamp, such as Vannacci, from growing larger and more menacing. Unfortunately, none of this will happen, because – as even the stones know – first-term MPs will only meet the pension eligibility requirements on 14 April next year, four years and six months after the start of the parliamentary term, and holding an election before that date will not be straightforward (there are 252 of them). But in this great festival of hypocrisy, one thing is certain: if we truly wish to bring stability to the country, if we truly wish to prevent these gnats from turning into monsters, if we truly wish to prevent a worn-out government from leading the country through a period marked by major challenges in the economy, in foreign policy and in Europe, we must challenge the Paludellum – and the only way to do so is the one that will not happen: going to the polls.