 "Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Rome today. File image/AFP")
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is planning to overhaul the election process in the country ahead of the upcoming elections in a bid to boost the prospects of her party’s victory.
If the country goes ahead with altering the voting system, this would be the fifth such overhaul Italy would see since the 1990s. Italy has a history of tweaking the election systems as parties deploy this move to turn the polls in their favour.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Senator Lucio Malan, the whip for Brothers of Italy, said, “We think that it would be in the interests of everybody to have a law that gives stability. With this system that we have now, the big risk is to have a hung parliament, with no majority, or unnatural coalitions.”
What is Meloni planning?
The Brothers of Italy party, led by Giorgia Meloni, is seeking to abolish first-past-the-post (FPTP) contests in favour of a modified proportional representation model. This legislative push is seen as a strategic move to prevent a unified left-wing coalition from gaining a parliamentary majority.
Currently, Italy operates under a mixed electoral framework established in 2017. In this system, 37 per cent of the seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate are determined by winner-take-all FPTP races, while the remaining are allocated proportionally based on party vote shares.
While the details of the plan are still in the discussion phase, the new system would involve a proportional representation with a “majority bonus” going to the party that has reached 40 or 45 per cent of the votes cast.
Quick Reads
View AllIs Meloni’s party threatened?
Fearing a potential partnership between the populist Five Star Movement and the centre-left Democrats in the upcoming election, Meloni’s coalition is concerned about its ability to secure a stable majority, particularly within the Senate.
Because Italian electoral regulations can be amended with a simple parliamentary majority, the country has seen frequent overhauls of its voting rules. This trend began following the collapse of the postwar political order during the massive corruption scandals of the early 1990s.