The row over voting rules flares up again in the Senate. The same old rhetoric, and now Boccia’s sighs

For every electoral law that is born, a democracy dies. But then it is reborn. The proceedings resumed yesterday in the Senate, amidst the August heat and a September mood – the worst possible combination – with four group leaders from the broad coalition lined up in the Nassiriya Chamber to speak (poorly) about the government’s electoral reform. Francesco Boccia, the PD group leader, sighs five times. The first sigh still has the professional tone of someone fulfilling a democratic duty; the last, the tone of someone who already knows the outcome; and in between lie seventy years of Italian dispute over voting rules, summarised better than the seven hundred amendments tabled yesterday by the left could ever manage. For whilst an amendment may declare a position, only a sigh reveals a state of mind. The tedium of the eternal return of the same. Always the same fly landing on the same noses. In 1953, the law allocating 65 per cent of the seats to whoever secures more than half the votes was dubbed a ‘scam’, and around that word seventy-seven hours of uninterrupted sitting were spent: Homeric filibustering, kicks, bites, stenographers’ chairs brandished like clubs, and a Communist MP overturning the ballot box. Fifty years later, the Senate’s Historical Archive dedicated an exhibition to it and published the proceedings under the title – which in itself sums up the whole affair – “Was it a real scam?”. The ‘Mattarellum’ – a deliberately pompous name for a two-bit system, in the view of Professor Giovanni Sartori, who coined the term in the 1990s – that reform which Pannella deemed a betrayal of the will of the people, was reintroduced in committee in June with two amendments sponsored by Riccardo Magi, a Radical. The Rosatellum, born in 2017 amidst a storm of abuse, is today the law whose survival the opposition is pleading for with the fervour usually reserved for monuments. And even the Porcellum, devised by Roberto Calderoli for Berlusconi, was later praised by Prodi, who won the 2006 elections thanks to it. Today, against the ‘Stabilicum’ – which the opposition has immediately renamed the ‘Melonellum’ because the name is always dictated by the opponent – accusations of unconstitutionality, disgrace, a plebiscite, a disguised prime ministerial system and the end of the parliamentary republic have already been levelled in the space of two months. But ‘was it a real scam?’ The verdict rests with Francesco Boccia’s sighs.

On 16 July, the Chamber of Deputies approved the ‘Stabilicum’ with 217 votes in favour and 152 against, and yesterday the bill resumed its passage through the Senate. The opposition, which has since dubbed it the ‘Melonellum’, has displayed placards, denounced the theft of democracy, invoked emergency powers and brought up the Acerbo Law – the legislation through which fascism secured control of Parliament in 1924. Now, the Acerbo Law allocated two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies to the list that exceeded twenty-five per cent. The ‘Stabilicum’ allocates seventy extra seats in the Chamber of Deputies and thirty-five in the Senate to whichever party reaches forty-two per cent, with an insurmountable threshold and a return to pure proportional representation if no party reaches that threshold – provided the majority does not reintroduce a run-off, as it is currently considering. This is not an argument in defence of the reform, but merely a measure of the gap between the facts and the words used to describe them. This gap is best appreciated from a distance, because in 2015, when the Renzi government called a vote of confidence on the Italicum, it was the right that cried ‘fascism’, and it was Renato Brunetta, leader of Forza Italia, who roused the ranks to action, whilst Bossi evoked the Aventine Hill. The same words, the same dire omens, the same tones of the nation’s last rites, shifting from one side of the chamber to the other. At this point, one is entitled to harbour a suspicion. Namely, that after seventy years of laws rewritten to provide the nation with a stability that is granted only intermittently, it might be worth seeking it where no one has ever looked for it: namely, in a certain aspect of language, which costs nothing, requires no three readings and does not have to pass through the Constitutional Court’s scrutiny.