Home » The new parliament has already been decided – Alessandro Calvi

The new parliament has already been decided – Alessandro Calvi

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The new parliament has already been decided – Alessandro Calvi

The elections have already taken place. And the rooms are largely already formed. It happened between 8 am on 21 August and 8 pm the following day, when candidacies and lists were filed, never so surgically constructed around the names of those who have decided to enter parliament. Party leaders, of course, established this. And then the current leaders and some notables, if strong enough to make their voices weigh. As for the voters, rather than choosing their own representatives, on 25 September they will mostly limit themselves to ratifying a decision already taken by others.

This is not new. Not in an absolute sense, at least. But never had it happened so clearly. “The parties have always been ravenous, in an attempt to rob the voters of the power to decide who should sit in parliament. But this time they crossed the line ”, wrote Antonio Polito in Corriere della Sera. If this could have happened, the reason is to be found at least in part in the system with which you will go to vote.

The law provides that the three-eighths of the seats in the chamber and senate – about one third of the total: 147 in the chamber and 74 in the senate out of a total of 600 parliamentarians – are assigned to single-member constituencies with a majority system, and therefore go to those who take at least one vote more than the opponent. The others are assigned to multi-member constituencies with a proportional system, and therefore on the basis of the votes obtained from the lists with which the candidates presented themselves. But here we will vote on blocked lists, and therefore on names proposed as a whole by the parties, without the voter being able to express a preference. Nor is it possible to vote separately, that is, to vote for a candidate from one party to the majority and vote for another party to the proportional one. Furthermore, the card is unique for each room, more proportional to the majority.

In short, take it or leave it. Moreover, the analyzes that have been circulating in recent weeks say that the constituencies of the majority in which the result is uncertain are very few, especially after the breakdown of the pact between the Action and the Democratic Party. And, as a simulation developed by Youtrend and Cattaneo-Zanetto & Co suggests, much of this can already be attributed to the right, unless the polls are completely wrong. Therefore, for some time now it has been possible to identify with reasonable approximation, and barring sensational surprises, a good part of the colleges in which each political force will elect its own parliamentarians. The result is in the paradox that Fabio Martini described in the press: “In the next thirty-two days all the leaders will continue to exchange flaming invectives, but in the meantime the competition for the choice of parliamentarians has already closed”.

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But that’s not all yet. The next one is in fact the first parliament for which the reduction in the number of parliamentarians approved in 2019 and confirmed with a constitutional referendum the following year will be valid. The chamber will go from 630 deputies to 400, in the senate from 315 senators to 200. In total, there are 600 parliamentarians: 345 fewer than the parliament currently in office. And this has further complicated the situation. Just think of the phenomenon that Stefano Cappellini in Repubblica defined “political nomadism”.

This is the case, for example, of those politicians who are candidates in a constituency other than their own to be sure of being elected. “In these hours it is as if the skies of Italy were full of open parachutes and aspiring deputies and senators in controlled descent towards more or less unknown lands,” Cappellini wrote. And this means that on September 25 the voters will not only be called upon to ratify choices already made by others, but that the relationship between parliamentarians and the territory will also weaken. Thus, in the next parliament, deputies and senators will end up representing more the power that chose them than the territory that elected them. And perhaps not by chance in recent years the response of the voters to the consolidation of these processes has been an increasingly massive abstention.

In this way, the community dimension of politics continues to be weakened

Moreover, the same political leaders in some cases have stood as candidates far from their own territory. Some of them have also chosen to avoid the single-member constituencies of the majority, which can present some pitfalls. The names of Enrico Letta, Matteo Salvini, Giuseppe Conte and Matteo Renzi, for example, will only be present in the blocked proportional lists. Silvio Berlusconi, Carlo Calenda, Luigi Di Maio, Angelo Bonelli and Giorgia Meloni will instead also run in a majority college, but without renouncing the safety offered by the proportional, even if for some the choice to apply also in other proportional colleges instead arises from the desire to magnetize a few more votes for the party.

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As mentioned, these are not new phenomena. But the electoral laws adopted from time to time only partially explain them. More generally, it is instead the result of a process of personalization of politics which in the last thirty years has progressively handed power into the hands of the leaders of the organizations that have replaced the popular parties. Of course, even after the war and up to the 1990s, the power of the parties could be excessive. And it is no coincidence that in that era there was talk of party politics. However, the presence of democratic structures that went back from the territory to the secretariats, and the celebration of national congresses, had made power more horizontal and widespread for decades than it is today.

At the beginning of the nineties, however, everything changes. Popular parties are replaced by lighter organizations, in all similar to electoral committees built around the figure of the leader. The glue that holds the group together is no longer an idea of ​​society but loyalty to the boss. It is not surprising, then, that the leaders have used, and are increasingly using, the composition of the electoral lists to shape the body of the parties on themselves. And, if this is the scheme, it is also clear why, at least for now, the electoral campaign, net of the personal clash between the leaders, is living above all on the debate around the rules of the institutions. The discussion on presidentialism is there to prove it. Instead, the company seems to have disappeared.

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Along this path, the community dimension of politics continues to weaken, while the old militancy has for some time been flanked, if not completely replaced, by the representation of an interest that is primarily individual. This also explains the number and quality of the often broken reactions of many politicians to the failure to re-nominate, or to candidacy in unwelcome colleges because they are considered difficult. This explains above all the publicity that some of them in recent days have felt they have to give to their complaints, calling press conferences or giving interviews against their own party, despite having been re-nominated anyway. And this also explains the choice of those who announced their farewell to the party to immediately move elsewhere. And these too, although not new phenomena, have now assumed unprecedented dimensions.

Unfortunately, among the consequences of this increasingly radical personalization of politics there is also the terrible electoral campaign that Italians are witnessing, among the worst that can be remembered. On the other hand, it would have been naive to expect something different from candidates brought up in parties that, structurally incapable of political elaboration, for thirty years have ended up rebuilding their identity against their opponents and not on new ideas.
There is still a month left to vote, and we have already reached the bottom of the abyss, when even the video of a rape has become campaign ground. The only hope is that the next few weeks go by without too much damage.

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