Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces a high-stakes test of her authority on Thursday as the country’s parliament holds its final secret vote on an overhaul of the electoral system.
The new system seeks to promote political stability by ensuring Italian elections deliver clear winners, whose ability to govern will be bolstered by a “majority prize” of up to 17.5 per cent of the seats in each house of parliament.
Though many coalition lawmakers are uneasy with a redesign they fear may backfire, Meloni has repeatedly warned her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party and its allies Forza Italia and the League that if the law is rejected, the government will be plunged into crisis.
“The final vote — even though it is secret, and it is not directly a confidence vote — is deemed by the prime minister as a confidence vote,” said Lucio Malan, FdI’s Senate whip. “If you are defeated in a confidence vote, you have to resign.”
But Malan said given Meloni’s determination to push the law through, “we can be confident that the outcome will be favourable”.
The contentious new election system — sometimes called the Stabilicum, or Melonellum — was devised with an eye towards ending Italy’s chronic political instability and bolstering the re-election prospects of Meloni’s rightwing coalition against a unified centre-left opposition.
If approved, the law would eliminate first-past-the-post constituencies — which now account for around a third of parliament seats — and move to a system of full proportional representation, a format in which the centre right tends to fare better.
The reform also creates a “majority prize”, a pot of parliamentary seats to be awarded to the winning pre-election alliance, provided it secures at least 42 per cent of the vote.
But with the ex-military general Roberto Vannacci’s fledgling far-right National Future party now eroding popular support from Meloni and her allies, her lawmakers fear the new system may backfire — paving the way for the centre-left opposition to win.
Lawmakers also gripe that other details of the new law threaten to sharply raise campaign costs for individual candidates and will result in a sharp drop in women’s representation in the legislature.
Still, political analysts said they expected Meloni’s lawmakers to vote yes on the electoral reform, even if grudgingly, to avoid parliament’s early dissolution.
“I think the law is going to be approved — all the signals go in that direction,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss University. “But when you are discussing 400 people — each of whom have their own interest — it’s very difficult to be absolutely sure.”
Daniele Albertazzi, a political scientist at the University of Surrey, said driving Meloni to seek early elections could cost first-time lawmakers their parliamentary pensions, which would kick in only if the legislature survives through early April.
“If the election law is rejected and Meloni resigns, there are a lot of people in parliament who are not going to get a lifetime pension,” he said. “This may sound like a very personal reason, but it’s a very sound reason not to sink the government right away.”
The law is just the latest attempt by Meloni to reform Italy’s institutional system, after her bid to overhaul the justice system was rejected in a constitutional referendum earlier this year.
“If they manage to approve it, she has a strong argument with the rightwing electorate that she is serious about giving Italy stability beyond herself . . . that she is trying to work for future stability,” Albertazzi said. “It’s some kind of legacy.”
The idea is to facilitate the rapid establishment of a stable governing majority, without post-election manoeuvring or the formation of unstable, ideologically incoherent coalitions unlikely to last.
To qualify as a pre-election alliance, and potentially secure the majority bonus, parties must agree on a joint prime ministerial candidate and political programme before the vote — a requirement already causing friction between the centre-left Democratic Party and its ostensible partner, the populist Five Star Movement.
But analysts warn that Vannacci’s appeal to Meloni’s traditional base could make it tough for her coalition to hit the support level needed to claim the majority bonus.
Should neither pre-election alliance secure 42 per cent of the vote, Roberto D’Alimonte, an expert in Italian election systems, said Italy could face renewed political turmoil, as the seats would then be distributed via proportional representation.
“If there is no coalition above 42 per cent, we are going [to] have chaos,” he warned. “It will be very very difficult to form a government that is going to be stable — because the system is very fragmented and very polarised.”