(ANSA) - Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi pressed ahead on Thursday with a controversial plan to reform the country's electoral system less than seven months before the nation goes to the polls.
The centre-right leader told reporters that parties in his four-way governing coalition had reached an accord on a reform bill which would introduce an entirely proportional system for allocating seats in parliament.
"We have political agreement within the coalition. It's done and so it's going to be put to the vote," he said. "As for the opposition, if it dropped its prejudices, it would see that this law is the very one that they wanted to propose during the previous legislature," Berlusconi claimed.
But the centre-left opposition heatedly renewed its objections that voting rules should not be changed just before next spring's general elections. It renewed threats to block all parliamentary activity in order to stop the new system being approved. Such an important reform requires the consensus of the opposition as well as the majority, it said.
It also argued that the reforms go against the will of voters, citing a 1993 public referendum in which Italians voted for the abolition of proportional representation. The coalition's unanointed leader Romano Prodi, who is ahead of Berlusconi in the opinion polls, accused the government of trying to improve its election chances after a recent thrashing in regional elections.
"They have decided to change the electoral law either in an attempt to win or an attempt to narrow their defeat... The spirit and the letter of democracy are being violated," the former European Commission chief said. "This reform will reduce stability... they want to pass from a bipolar system which still needs perfecting to a proportional system which is even more imperfect," he said.
Italy's current electoral system allocates 25% of parliamentary seats by proportional representation and the rest with a first-past-the-post system based on constituencies. The government's reform plan would introduce three separate cut-off thresholds for parties and coalitions. Individual parties obtaining less than 2% of the national vote would not be represented in parliament and their votes would not go towards their coalition's overall tally.
Parties obtaining less then 4% (but more than 2%) would not be given seats but their votes would contribute to their coalition's tally. Finally, individual coalitions which failed to win at least 10% would not obtain seats. In the event of a narrow outcome, the coalition with the most votes would be given extra seats to guarantee it a parliamentary majority of 340 seats in the 630-seat House and 170 seats in the 315-seat Senate. There are six parties in the centre-left alliance which
might not exceed the 2% threshold and so their contribution to the opposition's votes would be lost.
Fabrizio Cicchitto, a top official with Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, defended the reform plan saying that "with the new system, the will of the Italian people will be accurately reflected in parliament."
"These reforms do not represent any distortion of democracy... Those who speak of a coup are behaving in the usual demagogic and irresponsible way," he said. But Democratic Left Chairman Massimo D'Alema, whose party is the largest in the centre-left alliance, called for "steadfast opposition to this coup because the electoral law is not a party issue and this (reform) will cause serious damage to the country."
Some members of the opposition also demanded the resignation of House Speaker Pier Ferdinando Casini saying he might not play an impartial role during voting on the bill. Casini is a top member of the UDC, a small, centrist, Catholic party which has been pushing for the introduction of a more proportional electoral system.
UDC chief Marco Follini issued a statement saying that "the attacks on the House Speaker are incredibly unfair. These are entirely political attacks and have nothing to do with institutional concerns."
