Stabilicum: the most expensive of the free reforms. A problem of method and trust

Calling it “Stabilicum” is, it must be acknowledged, a minor masterpiece of unintentional irony. For the electoral law approved by the Chamber of Deputies demonstrates, by its very existence, exactly what its name promises to remedy. Since 1948, Italy has rewritten the rules by which it counts its votes at least five times. This makes six. Stability, evidently, is like modesty: those who need to declare it, by definition, lack it. It is worth clearing up a misunderstanding, however. The flaw in the Stabilicum does not lie in its figures.

The bonus for the coalition exceeding 42 per cent, the cap on additional seats, the inclusion of the best-performing party falling below three per cent: these are debatable parameters, like all parameters, no more and no less so than the Rosatellum they replace. Anyone looking for a scandal in the percentage threshold is looking in the wrong place. The scandal – if one can speak of a scandal in terms of due process – is of a different nature. It is a problem of method, and when it comes to the rules of the game, method is everything.

There is a category of assets that must be handled with the utmost care: the rules of the game. Their value lies not in their content, but in their durability. A rule that everyone knows can be rewritten by a simple majority at the first available opportunity is no longer a rule: it is a move. And moves, by their very nature, invite a counter-move. Germany chose its electoral rules once, in 1949, and has since merely tweaked them; France has had its two-round system since 1958; Spain has had its proportional representation system since 1977. The British first-past-the-post system has stood the test of time for over a century. Not because those systems are perfect – no system is, and there is even a theorem that proves it – but because those countries have grasped something that continues to elude us: that a mediocre but stable rule is worth more than an excellent but provisional one. Italy systematically does the opposite. It chases after the perfect electoral law and, never finding it – because it does not exist – changes one every five or six years. It is telling that, in Italy, electoral laws bear the surname of those who proposed them: the ‘Mattarellum’, the ‘Porcellum’, the ‘Rosatellum’, and the ‘Melonellum’ is already doing the rounds. A lexical detail that betrays the pathology. Elsewhere, the voting system is an anonymous institution, a piece of constitutional furniture that no one would dream of taking credit for.

Here, it is the private property of the ruling majority, signed off like a painting. And whatever is signed by one person, by definition, can be erased by their successor. Herein lies the first real cost – the one that no technical report mentions. Every reform wipes the slate clean of accumulated capital: voters must relearn how to weigh up their vote, parties must redraw the map of candidate nominations, and coalitions must recalculate the benefits of forming alliances. It is a learning cost that serious countries have paid only once, whereas we pay it in instalments, with every election. And, as is always the case with these hidden costs, it falls unevenly: those with more resources to keep pace with changing rules count for more; those with fewer count for less. The perpetual rewriting of the rules is not neutral with regard to whom it represents: it systematically favours those who write the rules over those who are subject to them. An artificially imposed transaction cost that becomes a net detriment to the democratic process. But there is a second, more insidious price, and it is this that dooms the Stabilicum even before the Senate.

An electoral law drafted by a single party, against all the others united in opposition, is born lacking the one thing that could make it enduring: the consent of those who did not vote for it. Rules of the game drawn up by a single team do not survive a change of team. It is almost a law of political nature. And so the calculation becomes ruthless: today’s majority, by tailoring the rules to its own current electoral base, merely hands tomorrow’s opposition the most legitimate of justifications for doing exactly the same, with the roles reversed. Every partisan reform is the logical precursor to the next partisan reform. It is a perpetual motion machine that each driver believes they can halt to their own advantage, but which instead simply passes the baton on.

Because this is, ultimately, what it is all about: an act of extraction. Not in the vulgar sense of self-serving gain, but in the specific sense of those who use public resources to capture a rent (seats not proportional to actual support) rather than to produce a common good. The majority bonus is the rent; the reform is the investment to appropriate it. And like any extractive operation, it dissipates more value than it creates: the parliamentary energy expended on redrawing the rules of power is energy diverted from the production of everything else. The most telling detail, in this regard, is the rejection of the amendment on preferential voting. In a secret ballot, shielded from any public accountability, a section of the very same majority that loudly calls for governability silently defended its own interests: closed lists, that is, a seat guaranteed from above. The gap between what is said openly and what is voted for in secret is, as the textbook would have it, the most honest measure of true preferences. And it shows that the stability being discussed is not that of the institutions, but the far more prosaic stability of one’s own position. It is no coincidence that the Quirinale is said to have issued a call not to tamper with the rules so close to the vote: the reminder – a basic tenet of any mature democracy – not to change the rules whilst the game is about to begin.

It is a principle, not a technicality. And it also points to the only possible way out, which, paradoxically, does not lie in finally finding the right law. It lies in removing the electoral law from the ordinary politics of majorities: making it difficult to change, shielding it behind a broader consensus than that of those currently in power, as has been done elsewhere with good sense. As long as the law by which we count votes remains a surname, rather than an institution, we shall continue to call ‘stability’ the very act that, more than any other, confirms its absence. The most costly reform is not the one that costs the most. It is the one that, for free, teaches one’s opponent how to create an identical yet opposing one.