(ANSA) - Parliament on Wednesday approved a new electoral system which the opposition says is designed to help Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right alliance in next spring's elections.
The new system, which must be signed by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi before it becomes law, ditches the first-past-the-post approach used for the bulk of parliamentary seats since 1993.
Instead, MPs will be elected via proportional representation, an approach that Berlusconi says is more democratic because it will reflect the strength of the parties within coalitions.
"Finally, a democratic law," the premier said after the Senate passed the bill definitively with 160 votes in favor, 119 against and six abstentions. Opposition senators voted compactly against the new system, accusing the government of trying to ensure that the centre-left will be unable to govern properly if it wins elections next April.
"You're trying to falsify the election results," said Democratic Left Senate Whip Gavino Angius. "If you had been forecast to win the vote you would never have changed this law."
The opposition says changes to electoral law should only be made with the consensus of both main blocs. "You're exploiting democracy, which cannot be transformed into a premier's dictatorship," Angius said in his speech to the upper house.
Under the new system, proportional representation (PR) will be used to elect members of both the House and Senate. This system was largely abolished in 1993 after a referendum in which 82% of the Italians who cast their ballots voted to dump it in a bid to achieve more stable government.
A largely first-past-the-post voting system was brought in based on constituencies in the hope that this would reduce the leverage of small parties, which have often been able to overturn governments in the past.
The new PR law establishes large voting districts rather than smaller constituencies and provides for party slates in which voters do not express candidate preferences. It also awards a 'majority prize' to ensure that the winning coalition has a working majority of seats. In the House the winning coalition is assured 54% of seats, in the Senate it will have at least 55% of the seats assigned to each region.
In both the House and Senate there will be three different cut-off thresholds for representation: in the House coalitions must receive 10% of the vote and independent parties outside coalitions need 4%, while parties within coalitions need only 2%.
In the Senate, coalitions will need 20% of the vote, independent parties 8% and coalition parties 3%. In Italy's previous voting system 75% of the seats in the two houses were elected by a first-past-the-post election and the remaining 25% were elected by proportional vote with a 4% cut-off.
The electoral law has enflamed political debate in recent weeks as the centre-left opposition has accused the government of changing the law because of opinion polls predicting its defeat.
Leaders of the bigger opposition parties also fear that if the centre left wins the coming elections it will have a smaller majority than it would otherwise have enjoyed, leaving it vulnerable to blackmail by tiny parties. The first-past-the-post system gave Italy relative political stability and although the first legislatures elected by this system were short-lived, the second two have
lasted the full five years.
