Italy's lower house gave final approval Thursday to a sweeping change in how the country elects its parliament, a reform pushed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that will govern the national election due by next year.
In a secret ballot, the Chamber of Deputies passed the bill 227 to 164, Reuters and the BBC reported. Meloni had warned she might resign and force an early election if it failed, so the vote was widely seen as a test of her hold on her right-wing coalition.
What changes
Today, roughly a third of Italian lawmakers win single-seat, first-past-the-post races and the rest are chosen by proportional representation. The new law makes the system fully proportional, but with a large thumb on the scale for the winner: any party or alliance that takes more than 42% of the vote gets 105 extra seats, 70 in the lower house and 35 in the Senate, according to the BBC. That bonus is meant to turn a narrow win into a working majority.
Coalitions will also have to name their candidate for prime minister, and publish a joint program, before the vote. The Irish Times reported that the law raises the number of signatures a party needs to run in a multiseat district from 1,500 to 6,000. More Europe lawmaker Riccardo Magi, who has been on a hunger strike over that change for a week, estimated a party would need 450,000 signatures, all gathered in person, to run nationwide, and called it "blatantly unconstitutional."
The fight over motives
Meloni argued the rules will produce stable governments. "Whoever wins must be able to govern," she wrote on X after the vote, as quoted by Reuters. Opposition parties say the reform was built to keep her in power and have promised to challenge it at Italy's Constitutional Court. Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein told the chamber, "Go ahead and change the electoral law, we will win in any case under any voting system."
The politics have shifted since the plan was drawn up. When it was conceived, Meloni's bloc led the polls. Reuters reported that a new far-right party, National Future, which emerged in February, has eaten into the governing parties' support, and polls now show the coalition trailing the center-left. Some analysts think the reform could end up hurting Meloni.
The requirement to name a prime ministerial candidate in advance is also awkward for the center-left, Reuters noted, because the leaders of its two biggest parties, Schlein and former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of the 5-Star Movement, have not agreed on who would lead a government.
Meloni's government, in office since 2022, recently became Italy's longest-serving since World War II. Her term formally ends in October 2027, though the BBC noted she could call the election as early as next spring.