[Note: trying out /c/politics’ new international politics focus]
The Italian prime minister’s calculation isn’t hard to understand — her party has a comfortable lead in the polls, but it’s far from an overwhelming majority.
The optics are terrible: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made proposals for constitutional reform that are eerily reminiscent of another constitutional change made a century ago by Benito Mussolini.
Adopted in November 1923, Mussolini’s notorious Acerbo Law established that the party winning the largest share of the vote — even if only 25 percent — would get two-thirds of the seats in parliament. And after his party won the subsequent election — although intimidation and violence proved more important there than tampering with electoral law — the road to dictatorship was paved.
Meloni’s current proposal now echoes this Acerbo Law, as the Italian leader wants to automatically give the party with the highest percentage of votes a 55 percent share of the seats in parliament. In other words, as long as one party receives more votes than any other — even if that were, say, 20 percent of the national vote — it will be rewarded with outright parliamentary control.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Adopted in November 1923, Mussolini’s notorious Acerbo Law established that the party winning the largest share of the vote — even if only 25 percent — would get two-thirds of the seats in parliament.
Meloni’s current proposal now echoes this Acerbo Law, as the Italian leader wants to automatically give the party with the highest percentage of votes a 55 percent share of the seats in parliament.
In essence, this proposal would treat the whole of Italy like a single constituency in a first-past-the-post election, with the party winning a relative majority, however small, claiming safe control of parliament.
Italian commentators have made many good proposals on how to adjust the system to make governments more stable — cementing an artificially created majority headed by a directly elected prime minister isn’t one of them.
The bloc is paying a steep price for ignoring developments in Hungary in the early 2010s, when the ruling Fidesz party overhauled the country’s constitution without even asking Hungarians — no referendum was held.
The party then made endless legal changes to cement its power, including electoral arrangements to secure Fidesz a two-thirds majority in parliament.
The original article contains 948 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
