The People Have Spoken
And what exactly did
they say? They said “Va fannculo”, which more or less
translates to “Go fuck yourself” or “fuck off”. This was the
campaign slogan of the populist ex-comedian Beppe Grillo, who
frequently exhorts his public to say it while flashing a “V” sign
with forefinger and middle finger. My apologies for the language but
that's Grillo, whose sensibilities run parallel to those of the late
George Carlin, never one to use a polite word or phrase when there
was a more off-colorful option. Grillo's new party, the Five Star
Movement (M5S) led the field, getting 25.5% of the votes for the
Chamber of Deputies, leaving 25.4% for the pre-election favorite
Partito Democratico (PD), 21.4% for Silvio Berlusconi's Polo della
Libertà (PDL), and 8.3% for Mario Monti Lista Civica.

Italy has 20 regions
and each has a proportional election to select a bunch of Senators
and another to elect a bunch of members of the Chamber of Deputies.
Nobody gets to vote for a person. You vote for a party with a list
of candidates. Here in Umbria, one of the 20 regions, we had
thirteen lists competing for seven seats in the Senate (curiously
divided into twenty-two national voting districts) and sixteen lists
competing for nine places in the Chamber of Deputies (even more
inexplicably divided into twenty-six voting districts) Those seats
are apportioned more or less in proportion to the percentage of votes
the party receives but clearly most of the smaller parties or lists
get no seats at all. The small parties tend to team up with the
larger parties, presumably to agree on policies but, if I understand
correctly, also to share in the number of seats awarded to the group.
How candidate lists and the apportionment of seats are determined
remain mysteries to me and, I suspect, to the majority of Italian
voters. Thus, while the M5S got a high percentage of votes
throughout Italy, the PD, which had the higher totals in central
Italy, and the PDL, which won decisively in the northern regions,
both took far more seats in both Houses of Parliament than the M5S.
That was due in part to their having three or four smaller lists
affiliated with them, while the M5S ran alone.
The election rules
threw the Va fannculo back in Grillo's face, as you can see from the
following:
In the 2013 voting
for the Senate the results were:
Grillo's M5S, with
23.8% of the vote, got 58 Senate seats, (19.2%)
Bersani's PD and
allies, with 31.6% of the vote, got 113 seats (37.5%);
Berlusconi's PDL and
allies, with 30.6 %, got 114 seats (37.8%) and;
Monti and friends,
with 9.1 %, got 16 seats (5.2%) for a total of 301 Senators, not
counting a small number of Senators for Life, a sort of golden
parachute program for respected senior citizens.
In the Chamber of
Deputies the breakdown of votes and seats went like this:
M5S 25.5% 110
seats (17.8%)
PD+
allies 29.7% 340 seats (55.1%)
PDL+ allies 28.9% 121
seats (19.6%)
Monti +
allies 10.6% 46 seats (7.4%)
617 seats
All this adds to a
robust total of 617 deputies deputies in the highest paid parliament
in Europe and perhaps in the world. (Note: The charts showing the
pre-election division of seats show 291 senators and 580 deputies as
opposed to the new totals of 301 and 617. We don't know if the
discrepancies represent delegate creep or just that the newspapers
have just lost track of how many MPs there really are.)
While we have
similar discrepancies in US elections between the numbers of votes
cast for a party's candidates and the number of those elected, this
result would seem to exceed the wildest gerrymandering dreams of Karl
Rove and Scott Walker. The American system confers two Senate seats
on each state, whether they be the size of Rhode Island, or of
California. In the US House of Representatives the disproportion is
even worse, based mostly on gerrymandering, i.e. the manipulation of
electoral districts to bundle like-minded voters into a few districts
while defining other districts to include just enough of the
traditional partisans of the gerrymanderers to assure their control.
However corrupt this may be, Americans at least get to vote for a
person with a name and a face against another known person. In Italy
if you mark a ballot with the name of a person on a party's list,
that ballot is annulled. Other than family and friends, nobody in
Italy has any idea of who these people on the lists are or how they
got there.
Following the
election results, all the pundits, parties and newspapers declared
Italy ungovernable. Grillo was to meet with Mario Monti, the
unelected head of the recent government of technocrats, i.e. bankers,
rather than career politicians, whose aim had been to impose on Italy
some of the currently fashionable austerity, which has done so much
to restore the virtue, if not the efficacy, of governments in
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. Grillo apparently would
support an interim government headed by Monti to pass measures
limited to two areas, election reform, and anti-corruption reform,
before new elections would be held.
His objectives start
with his party's own rules for the election:
All candidates
on his list must not have had past affiliations with existing
political parties.
All M5S
candidates had to agree to accept no more than 25% of their
parliamentary salaries, with the rest going to a fund to promote
small businesses.
Among his more
dramatic and attention getting getting proposals are:
referendums on
Italian adherence to NATO, the EU, the Euro and Free Trade
Agreements.
A citizenship
salary of €1000/month.
Default on the
public debt.
Nationalization
of the banks.
However, he also
calls for a vast number of measures to save energy, reduce
corruption and make the government more responsive to the electorate.
Among them are:
Abolition of
provincial governments and the combining of comunes (townships or
counties) with fewer than 5000 residents.
Abolition of
governing funding of the election expenses of the (many) political
parties.
Limits of two
terms for elected officials.
Elimination of
special privileges for Parliamentarians, including their pensions
after two years served.
Prohibition on
parliamentarians from holding outside jobs, or additional political
offices, while serving in Parliament.
Parliamentary
salaries to be brought in line with national norms.
People found
guilty of serious crimes shall not be eligible for elective office
nor for managerial positions in publicly listed companies. (Many
convicted felons, besides Mr. Berlusconi, occupy high office in
Italy, although he represents a pinnacle of sorts.)
All laws must
be self-financed when enacted.
New laws must
be published on the internet three months before taking effect.
Referendum
results must be enacted into law regardless of the percentage of
voters participating in the referendum. At present they are
advisory and non-binding if less than 50% of the voters participate.
Free internet
access for everyone.
No one person
shall be allowed to own more than 10% of any national publication or
TV channel.
There will be
only one public TV channel and it shall have no advertising.
Executive
salary limits on all publicly traded corporations and for those with
government participation.
How successful
Grillo's populist efforts will be remains to be seen. We do have
strong doubts about the likelihood of any of the three other
competing groups getting anything done to resolve Italy's major
problems. The Italian press, and even more the international press,
writes of both Grillo and Berlusconi as buffoons unworthy of
consideration. We're pleased that, unlike the US, where politicians
all seem bent on creating false problems, crises and deadlines while
ignoring real problems and running the country into the ground, Italy
seems to have at least one political leader who is proposing bold
solutions where they are needed.