Meloni: "Preferential voting is back at the suggestion of FdI; the left lacks credibility"

“Preferential voting in parliamentary elections had been absent since 1993 – that is, for almost 35 years. Today it is back because the centre-right has chosen to reintroduce it, following a proposal by Fratelli d’Italia.” This is what Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote on social media, just a few minutes after the Senate approved the centre-right’s joint amendment on preferential voting. “To the left, which today claims that this is not enough, I must point out that those who have never wanted them over the past 35 years – and who voted to reject them as recently as a month ago – lack credibility on this issue. Therefore,” she concludes, “the difference is not between those who want more preferences and those who want fewer. It is between those who have reinstated them in the law and those who have not.”

The amendment was approved by 97 votes in favour, 67 against and 2 abstentions, following an open electronic vote. The text is the one on which an agreement was reached in early August, following the resounding rejection by the Chamber of Deputies, which brought down the government in a secret ballot. The proposal provides for the nomination of a fixed lead candidate (without gender quotas), followed by six names (arranged in alternating gender order starting from the first name after the lead candidate), with the option for voters to mark up to three boxes, provided these are in favour of candidates of different genders.

Following the vote, the Senate chamber was filled with protests and placards. The majority claimed to have reintroduced this instrument of direct democracy, whilst shouts rang out from the opposition. The sitting was suspended by President Ignazio La Russa for around twenty minutes. 

Earlier in the day, however, the opposition’s sub-amendment – which aimed to introduce pure preferential voting – was rejected. Meloni had tried to ask the other parties in the government to put the broad coalition’s sub-amendment to a vote, but following a meeting, the majority rallied and voted against it.