[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.
I’m not understanding this:
If this sounds strange, that’s because it is. For example, if Poland had used this electoral system in its most recent election, the outgoing Law and Justice party would still control the Polish parliament, despite receiving only 35 percent of the national vote against the opposition’s 52 percent.
If the law and justice party received 35% of the votes and the opposition received 52%, then wouldn’t “the opposition” receive the 55% control of Poland’s parliament?
No, because the opposition is not a single party, but made up of 3 parties. Law and justice was still the biggest party, despite losing the election overall.
The opposition received 55% of votes all combined, while Law and Justice was the single party receiving the most votes. So effectively, unless all other parties would get together in a single big party (making a very different election), Law and Order would now be ruling Poland and instead the opposition parties formed a coalition.
I’m starting to see where I went wrong here. I should have taken a closer look at the breakdown of the election they were using as an example. I just kind of assumed that “the opposition” was the (perhaps imperfectly translated) name of a single party or coalition of some kind.
It’s poorly worded, but look at their link which shows Poland’s election. It will make more sense. The party only received 35% of the votes (the rest of the votes going to opposing parties), but they’d suddenly own 55% of the seats due to this system.
