Italian politics. Electoral games

The centre-right government proposes a sudden change of the rules

OPPOSITION politicians have long wondered how Silvio Berlusconi plans to win the next election, which must be held by May 2006. The economy is stagnating; Mr Berlusconi's right-wing coalition is in disarray and trailing in the polls. On the evening of September 13th, they feared they had their answer, when government parliamentarians suddenly tabled a legislative amendment that would change the rules for the election.

Romano Prodi, who hopes to replace Mr Berlusconi as prime minister, said the amendment was “tantamount to theft” and threatened to paralyse the legislature unless it was dropped. The new proposal would give the electoral system its biggest shake-up since 1993, when Italy decided to turn its back on the extreme form of proportional representation that was one cause of its chronic political instability.

Since then, Italy has had a hybrid system, in which three-quarters of the seats in both chambers are won on a “first-past-the-post” basis, with the remainder decided by proportional representation. The PR vote is subject to a 4% threshold meant to keep tiny parties out of parliament (they tend to get in all the same, because, in the horse-trading to form broad alliances of right and left, bigger parties win over smaller ones by giving them safe seats decided by majority vote).

The latest proposal would reinstate full proportional representation, but with a series of extra provisions ostensibly intended to produce stable government. This alone should favour Mr Berlusconi and his allies, who have always done better in the proportional vote. Psephologists reckon it could give them a two-point gain.

Under the new system, there would still be thresholds for securing representation in parliament - 4% in the lower house and 3% in the upper. But parties that failed to reach them would not merely be excluded from parliament. They would also be left out of the calculation to decide which side was the winner. This is crucial, because the winning side would then have its tally of seats increased to ensure that it had an outright majority. Thus, an alliance made up of a couple of big parties and several little ones could win more votes and yet end up with fewer seats. By an amazing coincidence, the opposition centre-left Union is just such an alliance.

The potentially perverse effects of the proposed reform are not the only reason why many Italians take a dim view of it. They have repeatedly shown that they want a stable democracy of alternating governments. That was the message of a referendum in 1993, when 83% voted for change. The system that has developed since has delivered something close to what the voters wanted. It has not reduced the number of parties in parliament, but it has herded them into two alliances, one of which has been in office for four years.

The proposed new electoral law risks turning the clock back to the days when Italy was repeatedly paralysed by coalition negotiations and run for most of the time by an all-encompassing Christian Democratic party that was incapable of decisive action. Mr Berlusconi may hope to help his own side; but when it comes to Italy's future, he is playing with fire.

Article suggests that the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy proposes a sudden change to the electoral rules, which will favour itself in the 2006 general election.