Italy 2022 elections: a guide

On Sunday, September 25 at 7 a.m., polling stations in Italy will open for the election of a new parliament. When they close again at 23 p.m., it should become clear what kind of parliament the country will receive and who will succeed Mario Draghi as prime minister.

But the election campaign does not bring much suspense this time. The victory of the right, entering the elections united, over the divided centre-left parties is almost certain. That makes it more than likely that the leader of the largest right-wing party, Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d'Italia, will be ordered by President Mattarella to form a new cabinet.

But it's not that far yet, so let's first take a look at exactly how the voting is done and why the chance of a right-wing victory is so high.

How and what is voted for

Just like with the elections of March 4, 2018 both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies – which have almost the same powers in Italy – are being renewed. With 2 important differences. In the meantime, the number of parliamentarians to be elected has been drastically reduced: in the Chamber from 630 to 400 members and in the Senate from 315 to 200.

The result is a parliamentary musical chair dance in which even big names are in danger of losing their seats. As a result, the directors of the various parties have thoroughly boarded up the candidate lists to ensure that their favorites do at least have a chance. So you can forget about preference votes.

A second news is that the voting age for the Senate has been lowered from 25 to 18 years, the same age as for the House. The composition of the two chambers of the Italian Parliament will therefore overlap even more than before, which in practice simply means duplication of work and does not benefit the effectiveness of political decision-making.

However, to be elected to the Senate (which in ancient Rome was literally a meeting of wise old men) you still have to be at least 40, while 25 years is sufficient for the Chamber.

The program rosatellum, an electoral monstrosity

Italian politicians love to invent new electoral systems, assuming that how someone is elected is at least as important as who is elected. That can lead to wonderful compromises.

The current electoral system, introduced in 2017, is a good example of this. It is known as rosatellum, named after its designer, Member of Parliament Ettore Rosato, a close confidant of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

It is an imaginative but also deformed mix of a system of proportional representation (as in the Netherlands) and a district system (as in Great Britain), in which the voter has to put a cross four times on 2 different ballot papers.

Here are the main rules:

• 61% of the seats, or 245 in the House and 122 in the Senate, are distributed proportionally among the parties according to the number of votes obtained. So whoever gets 10 or 20% will also get 10 or 20% of these seats.
• 37% (147 in the House and 74 in the Senate) in as many districts go to the man or woman with the most votes. So if one candidate from the right gets 40% and two candidates from the left get 30%, then the candidate from the right wins, even if he/she doesn't get the majority. And that is exactly what is going to happen in many districts, as the right forms a united front and the progressives go into battle divided. That means that the right-wing coalition, which is good for 46-47% in the polls, can win in four-fifths of the districts, taking at least 60% of the total number of seats.
• The last 2%, 4 senators and 8 MPs, are elected by Italians abroad, which is neatly divided into 4 Italian constituencies by the Election Commission.

The right-wing coalition

The right-wing alliance is made up of 3 parties (plus a non-business splinter) who are in firm agreement on one thing: together they can and must conquer government power. At the same time, they prey on each other's voters, so how long the idyll will last remains to be seen, but that will be a concern later on.

Giorgia Meloni

The undisputed star of the campaign is Giorgia Meloni, which has carried its extreme nationalist Fratelli d'Italia (literally Brothers of Italy: the opening words of the Italian national anthem) from a pitiful 4,3% in the 2018 elections to a (still) virtual 25-27%.

FdI's roots are in the neo-fascist movement and that leads many commentators, especially outside Italy, to portray Meloni as a danger to democracy.

That is a bit exaggerated, because the new supporters of her party are really not all fascists, but first and foremost conservatives who prefer to keep things as they are, with the traditional family and faith, preserving the existing order and privileges. and a flexible tax system.

Of course the FdI places great emphasis on the national interest, but at the same time Meloni adopts a pro-European and Atlantic stance and her party subscribes to the policy of support in the war against Russia that has been followed so far.

Matteo Salvini

The same cannot be said of its chief ally, also rival, Matteo Salvini, the League's leader. Where Meloni has become increasingly popular in recent years, Salvini's star has steadily declined after his failed grab for power in 2019.

Then his Lega was at 34% in the polls, now only 12-14%. Most of those former Lega supporters have switched to the party of the new idol of the right, Meloni.

Without attacking his ally too head-on, Salvini tries to win back some of it with spectacular (and unaffordable) promises: a 15% flat tax, debt cancellation, lower retirement age, extra support against high energy prices.

Moreover, as a longtime admirer of Putin, he is against arms aid to Ukraine and anti-Russian sanctions. In a future right-wing cabinet, he, and not Meloni, will be the main obstacle to a joint European Ukraine policy.

Silvio Berlusconi

As Dritte im Bunde we still have a former leader and helmsman of the right Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, 85 now and still going strong. Silvio's campaign has been limited to a series of video clips with the same messages and promises as those with which he entered the political arena in 1994.

His party Forza Italia has fallen to 7-8% and is only about to join in with the other 2. But for Berlusconi himself this election is mainly a personal satisfaction. He is a candidate again and returns to the Senate, where he was deported in 2013 after his conviction for tax fraud, which he considered a gross insult.

The divided (future) opposition

The other big loser, besides Salvini, threatens to become Enrico Letta, the leader of the Partito Democratico, the largest party on the left with more than 20%. In recent weeks, Letta has insisted on continuing Draghi's reform policies and on the alleged 'danger to democracy', which most Italians don't seem to really believe in.

He also tried to form a united front (led by him) with other progressives, but they quickly failed when the polls showed that they could get more votes if they went in the elections on their own.

As a result, the PD has only been able to reach an agreement with 2 smaller left-wing formations and Letta's dreamed coalition of the center-left does not go further than 26-27%, no less than 20 percentage points less than that of the right.

This is partly thanks to former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Carlo Calenda, former Minister of Economic Affairs. Rather than join Letta, they have united their two small parties, Italia Viva and Azione, in a 'center coalition' to hunt down moderate voters for whom Meloni's alliance is too right-wing.

That seems only half successful: their support seems to be limited to about 7%, the majority of which does not come from the right but from the PD.

Five-star movement

Finally, there is the Five Star Movement (M5S). The big winner of the 2018 elections (33%!) has been crippled in recent years by internal strife, secessions, expulsions and administrative incompetence, and has already lost two-thirds of its parliamentarians.

Former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who has been leading the M5S since this spring, has tried to regain some of the party's initial fervor by taking a radical Green-left course: expanding the M5S-introduced 'citizenship wages' ' (a type of social assistance benefit); more money for victims of covid and high gas prices; no regasification installations and no waste incinerators.

Those are exactly the things Renzi and Calenda, like the majority within the PD, think completely differently. Add to that the fact that the M5S, by denying its support to the cabinet, unleashed the crisis that toppled the Draghi government on July 21, and it is clear that the unified anti-right front was simply impossible.

But the M5S has spun yarn in the fall of Draghi. The party has since climbed from less than 10 to over 12%, which is what political leaders are all about.

What will the result be?

Experience shows that in Italy conservatives and progressives (at least in the voting booth) are about equally divided, with a small preponderance for the former. So if the progressives want to win, they must be united and the opponents not, especially in an electoral system that promotes coalition building.

This time it is exactly the opposite. Their divisions have disastrous consequences for the progressives for the distribution of seats in the districts. All polls put Letta's coalition 20 points behind the right, and while polls are often off (but never that far), under somewhat normal circumstances it is impossible to catch up.

And that is why the question is not who will win on September 25, but whether the right-wing coalition will win more or less than 60% of the seats.

Update September 26: as predicted Giorgia Meloni wins the election.