Majority vote. What do Italians choose at the ballot box?

Can one be both a liberal and a proponent of proportional representation? Like anyone else, those involved in politics are essentially concerned with their own interests, and it would seem clear what those of the leaders of the small ‘centrist’ parties are. They wish, quite legitimately, to secure or retain parliamentary representation. We currently have an electoral law that ‘pushes’ towards a simplification of the political landscape in its single-member constituency component: although these constituencies – which account for roughly a third of Parliament – are very large and weaken the link between elected representatives and voters, the battle to win them leads to the pooling of resources. The new electoral law that the majority would like to see provides, with the same objective in mind, for a majority bonus that would be triggered if at least one of the two coalitions were to exceed 42 per cent. Although it makes many concessions to the ‘smaller parties’, these are rules of the game that betray a certain conception of that game. On election day, Italians must choose who they want to govern them: not merely who they consider best suited to represent them.

If it makes sense to speak of the ‘Second Republic’, it is precisely in this sense. Since 1994, we have effectively been voting for a Prime Minister-designate. Berlusconi, Prodi, Berlusconi, Prodi (albeit by a whisker), then Berlusconi again. The system hit a crisis in 2013 and 2018, when a third political force of undoubted significance emerged: the Five Star Movement. With the reabsorption of the Five Star Movement into the left, we have returned to voting for the Prime Minister, and in 2022 we voted for Meloni. Of the two coalitions in the running, one is still the one formed in 1994, even though its internal balance of power has shifted.

At the heart of the matter, it has become fashionable to argue that the first-past-the-post system – which we have experimented with (albeit with varying nuances) in recent years – has failed. We should turn back the clock and return to a ‘true’ proportional system. The Rosatellum is already, for the most part, proportional, and the law that Meloni dreams of to bring ‘stability’ to election results is highly proportional. The parties – whether on the right, in the centre or on the left – do not like the single-member constituency system, and thus the one-on-one contest between candidates, which implies a process for selecting the political class. Berlusconi, the most successful product of the Italian-style first-past-the-post system, had already set the reversal in motion with the ‘Porcellum’. It is understandable that a leader would prefer to select his troops directly.

Those who look back fondly tell us that in the halcyon days of the First Republic, things were different. Political struggle, however fierce, allowed for dialogue, compromise and negotiation. Those in power did not ‘take it all’, but left a little room for others. The political class was better prepared. Consensus was built through preferential voting, from which the most prominent figures emerged. The small secular parties, although (with the exception of the PSI) always relegated to vote shares as low as a telephone prefix, managed to influence the actions of the government’s Moloch, the Christian Democrat ‘White Whale’.

Assessing the acrimony or civility of political debate is complicated; in any case, it is difficult to assume, in this regard, that the electoral law is the only relevant factor. Let us confine ourselves to less controversial observations: for over forty years, Italy has been a gridlocked democracy. The only election in which our grandparents actually voted was that of ’48. The combination of a proportional representation system and the impossibility of a governing alternative at national level creates an unstable stability: frequent changes of prime minister and government, considerable leverage in the hands of the smaller parties, and a Catholic party that has absorbed a wide range of viewpoints, offering the country not a political programme but a process of constant mediation on every issue.

It was evident from the very dawn of the Republic that something was amiss. Alcide De Gasperi, unanimously recognised as the finest Prime Minister in our history, sought to govern according to the ‘cabinet government’ model, whereby the majority party (or coalition) exists to support the government, rather than the government existing to implement decisions taken elsewhere by the parties. From this perspective, the Prime Minister must be the focal point of political synthesis, not a permanent mediator between the factions that elected him. Yet not even De Gasperi managed to reshape the party-based republic – a remarkably enduring product of a very brief period, that of the CLN, during which, following the civil war, the institutions devastated by fascism and the war were rebuilt. The governments of that period, though led by the statesman from Valsugana, were guided by policies and assessments formulated elsewhere. The relationship of trust existed between the parties and the ministers.

The Christian Democrats (DC) are the dominant party, but they are internally divided and are under the curse of never being able to lose an election. With the end of the Degasperi era, they provided all the heads of government right up to Spadolini (1981). It is the Prime Minister who belongs ‘to the party’, not the party that belongs ‘to the Prime Minister’. It is not merely a question of limits on executive power: it is the shift in the locus of decision-making within the parties that characterises the First Republic. In majority systems, leaders come and go; in proportional systems, they blackmail one another.

The outcomes are well known, and only a singular case of amnesia could lead one to regard them as compatible with any version of ‘liberal’ politics: the use of public spending to cultivate consensus and clienteles (each firmly attached to the bandwagon of a vote-gatherer), the resulting public debt, and decision-making processes that rendered impossible any proposal that did not coincide with an expansion of the state’s sphere of action. The leaders of the First Republic who claim to have an independent vision – one not purely based on clientelism – are, not coincidentally, anomalies (such as Bettino Craxi), and if they succeed to a certain extent in their aims, it is always for the same reason. They lack popular legitimacy; their strength always rests on the mediation of the parties. And how can a strong, radical, reformist proposal gain ground in such a context?

We can discuss the problems, the mistakes and the unfulfilled promises of the Second Republic. We can discuss how Berlusconi carried out a liberal revolution in words only, how the left failed to shake off its habit of factionalism, and how pinning all hopes of renewal solely on the electoral law was a gamble. The ‘Mattarellum’ (75 per cent first-past-the-post, 25 per cent proportional representation) could not have been enough to change such deeply entrenched practices. But it did achieve something. Italians have become accustomed to choosing who will govern them and have regularly delivered their verdict – a negative one – on those who have governed them (for 32 years now, whoever is in power has lost their majority in the subsequent election). The Second Republic was not a golden age of reformism, but there were labour market reforms, privatisations and liberalisation. Generally speaking, more reforms were carried out during the parliamentary terms elected under the Mattarellum than afterwards. The rules of the game mattered, not least because the absence of constituency-based competition contributed to the ossification of the political class. We can agree that the quality of the political class has deteriorated (after all, not even the centrist leaders resemble Merzagora or Malagodi), but if we look for ‘objective’ indicators, it is difficult to find any. There is often talk of education and academic qualifications. If we look at the percentage of elected members with university degrees, there have never been as many as in this nineteenth parliamentary term. Politics, after all, necessarily reflects society: the proportion of university graduates is higher than it has ever been. In 2018, during the unquestionable golden age of the Five Star Movement, the Five Star Movement was the parliamentary group with the highest number of graduates.

In a democracy, the number of political factions is also influenced by the electoral system. Political parties do not exist in the natural world: they are formed or disbanded as circumstances dictate. Smaller parties tend to prefer a proportional representation system. As Luigi Einaudi (who wrote at great length against proportional representation) explained to us, no proportional parliament reflects the full spectrum of available opinions, but rather the range of opinions that can be organised for the purposes of the struggle for power. After all, there are a dozen political forces in Italy. Are there just as many possible approaches to foreign policy? Are there twelve “schools” of economic policy?

Political parties are machines for seizing and managing power. This is true whether the electoral system is proportional or a first-past-the-post system; it is true whether parties are large or small; and it is true whether they are ‘personal’ or ‘assembly-based’. A good electoral system is one that helps voters make the connections and forces parties to be, as far as possible, accountable.

Those who miss the proportional system do not want it to be known on election night who will govern – to use a phrase dear to Matteo Renzi – but rather that governments should be formed in Parliament. Today, this would appear to be a way of sidelining the ‘extremes’, which could be left out of governments where differing viewpoints converge to reach an agreement – usually on international alignment (pro-Atlantic, pro-European) – from which a series of corollaries in domestic policy would magically follow. The most optimistic believe that reforms are easier to implement with grand coalitions, thanks to a sort of bilateral ‘disarmament’ on the part of the political forces. Germany has had twelve years of grand coalitions under Mrs Merkel: the most recent reforms were carried out by a government with a clear political stance, that of Schröder. Italy, meanwhile, has now had more than one such experiment under its belt. The truly exceptional circumstances in which the Monti government had to be formed undoubtedly made it possible to get the parties to swallow some bitter pills: starting with the Fornero law. But even that government’s progress was in fits and starts, and it gradually lost its reformist drive: the closer the elections drew, the more the parties, understandably, entrenched themselves in defence of the groups that supported them.

The most significant consequence of governments led by ‘technocratic’ prime ministers has been the electoral successes of parties not part of those governments: the League and, above all, the Five Star Movement in one case, and Brothers of Italy in the other. In a world where politics seems, almost by definition, far removed from people’s choices and concerns, depriving them of the power to choose their own prime minister is an excellent strategy. For those who thrive on “fuck you” rhetoric.

Perhaps the proportionalism espoused by some liberals is, above all, a matter of convenience. In our country, parties with a ‘majority-voting orientation’ must, by definition, look elsewhere. Liberal cultures are weak. So it is better to sneak them into Parliament than to leave them out. But this defeatist liberalism is, at least in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy. When liberalism convinces itself that it is, at best, the preserve of enlightened minorities, it will be increasingly crushed by its own caricature: that of the conventional wisdom of the elites, always and in every respect aligned with Brussels, which, incidentally, does not seem (amidst dreams of extravagant spending and censorship of social media) particularly liberal in any intelligible sense of the word.

Let us imagine for a moment that Meloni, in certain circumstances, were to prove herself – with all due respect – to be the heir to Alcide De Gasperi. That is to say, just as happened in 1953, the majority bonus would not be triggered. The majority would have to be formed within the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. It could be an unprecedented ‘backroom deal’ between FdI and the PD, with the centrists acting as go-betweens. Is there a single person who can imagine that such a government might bring about liberalisation or an attempt to renew the welfare state?

It is unlikely that either the right or the left will carry out major reforms. Perhaps some of those reforms would be terrible. However, they would be the reforms that voters have chosen through their votes. The government’s actions would be assessed, rewarded or punished at the next election. It may not seem like much, but for the bulk of our democratic history, things have not gone that way. What is liberal about striving to prevent this?