Sniping continues between Spain and Italy over the immigration “crisis” at Ceuta that we looked at last week. Spain has now retaliated by imposing border checks on travelers arriving by air or sea from Italy (there is no land border), supposedly to last for a month. By then things will probably have calmed down, although that’s small consolation for those whose loved ones were among the hundred or more killed trying to find refuge in Ceuta.
For the Europeans it’s political theatre. And Spain’s Pedro Sánchez isn’t the only one facing an election in the near future: Italy will also go to the polls next year, and prime minister Giorgia Meloni is looking shakier than she did a year or so ago. Trying to be simultaneously a pillar of the European order and a far-right insurgent against it is a difficult balancing act; if anything, Meloni deserves credit for having managed it for so long.
At the last Italian election, in 2022, the three parties in Meloni’s coalition won 43.1% of the vote between them, most of it with Meloni’s post-Fascist Brothers of Italy. The centre-left had 26.6%, the populist Five-Star Movement (actual populists, that is, not far right) 15.2% and the centrists 7.7%. That was enough for a right-wing majority in both houses – 237 out of 400 in the lower house and 115 out of 200 in the Senate.
Since then, Brothers of Italy has consolidated its position as the dominant party on the right; by late last year it was above 30% in the polls, although it’s now back to the high 20s. But the government as a whole has been harmed by the emergence of a further-right rival, National Future, polling at around 7%. Its gains seem to have come largely at the expense of the League, the more established far-right party, which (as is the way of these things) has apparently been tarnished in its followers’ eyes by its participation in government.
So it’s understandable that Meloni’s record has resembled a series of zig-zags, trying to simultaneously appeal to the mainstream where most of the votes are and also stem disaffection on her right flank. Hence her swing to the right over immigration comes off the back of a pivot the other way a month earlier, when she went out of her way to distance herself from Donald Trump. That in turn followed on from a shift against Israel back in April, which was a nod to the mainstream but might also have appealed to antisemitic sentiment on the right. And before that there was a spat with Trump over his criticism of the pope.
But trying to appease the voters is not the only path to electoral success. There’s also the time-honored strategy – in which Italy is not alone – of fiddling the electoral system. You might think the Meloni government was already well placed on that front, having won a substantial majority last time notwithstanding the fact that most Italians voted against it. But it decided that more could be done.
The current system is a mix of proportional and single-member (first-past-the-post) seats; the right won because, against divided opposition, it cleaned up on the single-member seats, winning 121 out of 146. Its problem is that if its opponents co-operate, and especially if their vote improves a bit, they could reverse that situation.
Meloni’s solution is to abolish the single-member seats, returning to something more like the system that prevailed before 2017. Seats will be proportional, but the coalition that comes out ahead, provided it has more than 42% of the vote, will get a bonus allocation of seats in each house to effectively guarantee it a majority. There was also to be an option to vote for individual candidates on party lists, but that failed to survive a vote in the lower house.
The reforms are now before the Senate; there may be further amendments there, and there may also be legal challenges (the courts in the past have disapproved of both the closed lists and the winner’s bonus). But assuming they survive in roughly their current form there is still a question of whether they will work as intended. Many past leaders who’ve tried to tamper with electoral systems have discovered that the attempt can backfire badly.
That was the case with the previous shift to proportional representation, masterminded by Silvio Berlusconi in 2005: he lost the subsequent election. This time the right is basically gambling that while the parties to its left might co-operate enough to divide up single-member seats between them, they won’t be able to form a single coalition with an agreed candidate for prime minister. If they do, they will be hard to beat.
The World is Not Enough 