Italy’s best hope: Berlusconi

ROME — If the leaders of Italy’s largest political parties are to be believed, they all want the same thing: new elections as soon as possible. The trouble is the country doesn’t have a functioning electoral law under which to hold a vote.

In the hours following outgoing Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s constitutional referendum defeat on December 4, his political opponents fell over themselves to call for a quick return to the polls. Members of Renzi’s Democratic Party — including reportedly Renzi himself — were quick to join the chorus.

It will be some time, however, before Italians are able to cast their ballots. Italy is the only country in the European Union that has two coequal parliamentary chambers: the house (Chamber of Deputies) and the senate (Senate of the Republic). Any legislation, including the formation of a new government, needs to pass muster in both chambers.

In 2015, the Italian government revised the electoral law governing the Chamber, introducing measures I had proposed to Renzi: a two-round election, with a bonus guaranteeing 54 percent of the seats for the party that won the most votes. Should Renzi’s referendum have passed, it would have eliminated the Senate, transforming it into a largely consultative assembly of politicians appointed by regional councils.

These measures — nicknamed the Italicum — were intended to make it easier to govern the country. But with the failure of the referendum, they have had the opposite effect.

Not only has the Senate survived, the two chambers have radically different electoral systems. Unlike the Chamber of Deputies after the Italicum, the Senate’s voting system is strictly proportional, with no bonus for the winning party.

Adding to the problem is the fact that the two chambers are elected by two different electoral bodies; 18-year-olds can vote for the Chamber of deputies, but one has to be at least 25 to cast a ballot for the Senate.

Any election that took place under the existing law would bear a high risk of producing different outcomes in the two chambers, making Italy even less governable than usual. Which is why President Sergio Mattarella has explicitly said that the two electoral systems must be harmonized before Italians vote again.

This change would not rule out the possibility of different outcomes in the two chambers but it would reduce the risk. It could be done by the Constitutional Court or by parliament — and hopefully it will be the court that decides.

On January 24, the Constitutional Court will rule on a challenge to the constitutional legitimacy of the Italicum. While the judges will be evaluating various aspects of the law, the most critical decision relates to the runoff election and the subsequent electoral bonus.

The legal argument against the bonus is that it could create an excessive distortion in the vote-seat ratio if the party that won in the second round received a relatively small percentage of votes in the first round. It is a dubious argument, but it is a weighty one in a country with a deeply rooted proportionalist culture.

Should the court strike down the measures, early elections in the first half of 2017 will become viable. This seems to be Renzi’ s preferred option.

If not, it will be up to parliament to devise a new electoral system. This will be a top priority for incoming Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni’s new government. But it won’t be easy for him to deliver.

While some think that parliament will act quickly, I have strong doubts. It will likely take months to put together a majority in favor of a new electoral law. In this scenario, the most likely date for new elections will be the spring of 2018.

The result is expected to be predictable. There is little chance of an effort to reintroduce a majority system — if only because doing so would provide the anti-establishment 5Star Movement with its best shot at governing.

And so Italy will probably return to the system of proportional representation that has produced decades of political instability and legislative inertness. The new system might contain some disproportional features, but most likely it will not have any incentive favoring the formation of pre-electoral coalitions. Nor will it contain any measures favoring a clear governing majority.

Italy’s political future will depend on how its anti-establishment parties perform. Recent polls have put the 5Star Movement in first place, but it is unwilling to enter into alliances. Similarly, right-wing parties like the Northern League and Italian Brothers — which are performing relatively poorly — would balk from allying with the Democratic Party.

If the 5star Movement, Northern League and Italian Brothers take a combined total of more than 50 percent of the vote, the result will be gridlock — and the inability to form a government of any sort.

Under a strictly proportional system, Renzi’s Democratic Party will almost certainly be unable to form a government on its own. As a result, Italian stability is likely to depend on the return of a familiar face to the political scene.

The irony of Italian politics today is that whenever the next elections are held, many in Italy — and Europe — may find themselves praying that former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia does well enough in the polls to steal support from his right-wing rivals and join the Democratic Party in government.

Roberto D’Alimonte is an expert in electoral law at LUISS University in Rome