The first data of participation in Italy does not point to a great mobilization. The scrutiny revealed by the Ministry of the Interior at 12 noon shows that the influx of voters in schools has stood at 19.21%. That is, two tenths less than in the last general elections of 2018. So, at that same time 19.43% was reached of Italians who had gone to vote. Some data that comes after the surprising announcement of her great favorite, Georgia Meloni, that she is going to delay her visit to the polling station to vote until ten at night. Something that she justifies with the large number of photographers waiting for her.
This movement of the leader of the Brothers of Italy has coincided with these participation data. This is the first of three planned by the Italian authorities, which will also offer Voting data at 7:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.. The regions of Emilia-Romagna, Frilu-Venezia, Liguria, Lombardy, Tuscany or Veneto are some of those that have exceeded 20% participation at 12 noon.
Turnout in the 2018 Italian general election reached 72.94%, a relatively high figure. In Spain, the participation remained at 69.87% in the November 2019 elections.
Along with the participation data, another of the attractions of the first hours of the electoral day is the vote of the great favorite. An event that Giorgia Meloni has delayed to ten at night, an hour that is unprecedented for a candidate in an election. Above all, if it is the one with the most options to be prime minister.
For the moment, several of his rivals have voted. In the Italian capital, the leader of the Democratic Party (PD), Enrico Letta, and the centrist Carlo Calenda, at the head of Acción, a formation that goes to the elections allied with Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva, have done so. Former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, of the 5-Star Movement, is still expected to do so. Another of those who has already cast their vote in the ballot box is Matteo Salvini, from the League, who in this case is one of Meloni’s allies.
From these legislative elections will emerge the government that will replace the national unity government of Mario Draghi who has led Italy from February 2021 until his fall this summer. The lack of support caused the advance election one year ahead of time (In Italy, elections are every five years).
Options
The unity of the center-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni from the extreme right gives it an advantage in the Italian electoral system compared to center-left parties, which are presented separately in various options. The conservative bloc offers itself as a clear choice: it goes to the elections in a united list made up of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (the one that leads the intention to vote in previous polls), the League of Matteo Salvini, the Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi and the minority We the Moderates of Maurizio Lupi.
For the center-left, on the other hand, there are more possibilities, which disperses the vote. There is a main coalition of four parties led by the Democratic Party-Democratic and Progressive Italy of former Prime Minister Enrico Letta, which also includes the smaller Green and Left Alliance, +Europe of Emma Bonino and the Civic Engagement-Democratic Center of Luigi di Maio, the acting foreign minister who created this new party in the summer after leaving the Five Star Movement, of which he was head until 2020.
In addition to this main coalition, the potential center-left voter has at least two other prominent options on the ballot. One is that of Conte’s Five Star Movement, who was prime minister between 2018 and February 2021, when the main parties chose Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, to preside. a consensus executive, broken this summer.
The other candidacy is that of the union of the centrist Action-Italia Viva-Calenda, headed by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (he left the Democratic Party to create Italia Viva) and Carlo Calenda, the latter in favor of a new government of national concentration like Draghi’s.
In this way, while the center-right vote is concentrated in a coalition, the center-left goes to the polls divided into at least three options.
Electoral system
This September 25th, the 400 deputies of the Upper House and 200 of the Senatereduced from the previous 630 and 315 after the constitutional reform approved in a referendum in 2020. The election system is mixed: 61% of the seats (245 in Parliament and 122 in the Senate) are distributed proportionally, 37% ( 147 and 74) is awarded to the candidate with the most votes in the uninominal colleges, and the remaining 2% (8 and 4) is chosen by voters abroad by a proportional system.
With this system, whoever obtains, for example, 44% of the proportional seats and 65% of the single-member seats, ensures an absolute majority. On this occasion, the key to the results is in the single-member election, where the most voted name takes the seat even if it is by a single vote difference. For this reason, the united candidacy of the center-right, which offers a single candidate for each single-member association, has more options to win here than the center-left, which is presented separately.
Those who go to the polls in the 7,904 municipalities from Italy find themselves with a pink ballot for Parliament and a yellow one for the Senate that all the candidates pick up. Each candidacy (from a coalition or from a single party) has two parts: one with the name of the candidate for the corresponding uninominal college (Italy is divided into 147) and the other, below, with the closed list with up to four names that corresponds to your party (or to each of the parties in a coalition) in that municipality for proportional distribution. You cannot vote for a single-member candidate and a list of different parties.
For example, in the candidacy of the center-right coalition (the same goes for the center-left) a single candidate appears, above, for the uninominal college and, below, the image of each of the four parties of the bloc for proportional distribution. . The voter has to mark only one of those four parties; if he points to the uninominal candidate but does not mark any party in the candidacy, the value of this individual vote is distributed proportionally among the four formations according to the general votes that each one has garnered. Conversely, if you check a party but do not check the name of the single-member candidate, your vote is awarded to that candidate anyway.
In the campaign, all the parties have had youth and their problems of precariousness and lack of work as one of their axes. In these elections, the first in which the voting age for the Senate is lowered to 18, the same as for the Upper House, 2,682,094 young people can vote for the first time who have reached the age of majority.
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