I have long maintained that the progressive deterioration of Italian politics, with the appalling spread of clientelism and corruption, has its origins in a terrible electoral system which has fueled a sort of "adverse selection", i.e. a system which crowds Parliament with incompetent people with the only merit of being people trusted by the parties and their leaders. It is no coincidence that it has been called Porcellum, disrespecting the mammals that contribute to our diet.
An unfair selection system, as underlined by the High Court, which could not fail to generate perverse effects. Government and Parliament unable to enact the slightest reform and only careful to protect stability as an end in itself. Difficult, if not impossible, to find signs of actions or at least of reform proposals other than those of widespread tax increases and growing bureaucratic complications. A combination of incompetence and lack of responsibility. And, what is more serious, the country continues to slide towards social decline and economic degradation, with public spending showing no signs of slowing down and a constantly rising debt.
The reform of the electoral law is, therefore, the reform of the reforms to correct the roots of the evils that afflict our society and which make government actions both effective and representative of the will of the Italians impossible. Renzi must be recognized for the determination with which he focused on the electoral reform, together with the reform of Title V and of the Senate, the bearing elements of the hoped-for renewal.
The proposed new electoral system, the Italicum, is moving in the right direction but needs to be simplified in the rules to ensure governance by favoring the parties that will be able to gather greater support along the the lucid proposal by Ernesto Auci, but it must also protect the representativeness of those elected with respect to the voters both to eliminate the harmful gap that has arisen between one and the other and to prevent the vote from being directed to the party regardless of the candidates.
In other words, I believe that for each constituency a party should advance candidates equal to twice the number of seats available, leaving the citizens free to express their preference, albeit in a limited group. Furthermore, candidates should have their residence in the municipalities where the college gravitates, so as to avoid the harmful practice of presenting names that are completely foreign and detached from the pertinent territory.
