ROME — The Italian opposition parties as a bloc have demanded this Tuesday the resignation of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, after losing an important parliamentary vote on her reform of the electoral law.
The Chamber of Deputies, the Lower House of the Italian Parliament, rejected by one vote an amendment presented by the Meloni Government on the electoral lists, on the first day of processing the legislative reform.
This implies that the Executive has lost the parliamentary majority in the debate on this amendment and that numerous right-wing parliamentarians voted against their party.
The result was celebrated by the opposition and its leaders: the secretary of the Democratic Party, Elly Schlein; the president of the 5 Star Movement, Giuseppe Conte, and the coordinators of the Green and Left Alliance, Angelo Bonelli and Nicola Fratoianni, among others.
Once the parliamentary session was over, they all gathered at the door of the Roman Palace of Montecitorio, headquarters of the Chamber of Deputies, to summon Meloni to open a government crisis before the head of state, Sergio Mattarella.
Bill shakes up politics
The president, like several of her predecessors in the past, is trying to reform the electoral law and has accelerated its processing before the summer break and at the beginning of the last year of the legislature.
It is a very important text for her that has shaken politics these days, raising the ‘no’ of the opposition en bloc and some doubts among her own coalition partners, the conservative Forza Italia and the far-right League.
These differences within Meloni’s right-wing alliance have been confirmed with today’s vote, since the result reveals that numerous parliamentarians from the government bench rejected the reform protected by the anonymous voting system. In Italian political jargon these are known as ‘snipers’.
The objective of the electoral reform, according to its promoters, is to provide greater stability to future governments and to this end, its main novelty is the introduction of a ‘seat award’ to the list or coalition that manages to reach 42% of votes in an election.
Amendments
However, as soon as it reached the Chamber of Deputies, the text received 200 amendments.
The one that led to this defeat for Meloni proposed candidacies with armored list leaders and the rest of the candidates subject to the voters’ preference. The government’s minority partners had accepted this measure at the last minute and with hesitation.
An hour after knowing the result, the prime minister limited herself to acknowledging on her social networks that within her own coalition “reflection is needed” since “some votes have been missing.”
Furthermore, he claimed that his intention was to allow voters to elect their own parliamentarians after 30 years of closed lists and criticized the opposition for “exulting as if they had won a World Cup” after this vote.
The Chamber of Deputies should foreseeably continue with the debate on the reform and, once it is approved as a whole, it will go to the Senate to complete its processing.
