Parliamentary elections in Italy 1994
The 1994 parliamentary elections took place on March 27 and 28, 1994 . They are considered to be the turning point from the so-called First to the Second Italian Republic. There was no new constitution, but there was a new electoral law and a complete upheaval in the party system.
The winner of the election was the center-right alliance around the Forza Italia party, which had only been founded a few months before the election and which subsequently formed the government under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi .
meaning
For the first time, Mattarellum was elected after the new suffrage named after Sergio Mattarella . Pure proportional representation was replaced by a mixed system: three quarters of the seats in the Camera dei deputati were allocated according to the principle of majority voting, only one quarter proportionally according to the voting share of the parties with a threshold of 4 percent (before Italy did not have any hurdles for moving in to parliament).
At the same time, there was a radical change in the party system. After the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) - traditionally the second strongest force in the country - officially adopted communism in 1991 and renamed it the “Democratic Left Party” ( Partito Democratico della Sinistra , PDS), the five moderate parties that had since During the Second World War they were mostly represented in government coalitions and in the 1980s they had formed a stable cartel called Pentapartito (the “Five Party”), suffered massive losses and in some cases collapsed completely. They were badly affected by the Tangentopoli (“City of Bribes”) corruption scandal and the so-called manipulite trials, which uncovered widespread corruption among government politicians.
Due to majority voting, some parties formed official electoral alliances for the first time. The most important of these were:
- the center-right alliance Polo delle Libertà (in the north: Forza Italia with CCD , Lega Nord and UdC ) and Polo del Buon Governo (in the south: FI – CCD, Alleanza Nazionale and UdC)
- the center-left Alleanza dei Progressisti (PDS, PRC , AD , PSI , La Rete , Verdi , CS )
- the center alliance Patto per l'Italia ( PPI and Patto Segni )
Result
Chamber of Deputies
Polo delle Libertà Polo del Buon Governo |
be right | % | Seats | Alleanza dei Progressisti | be right | % | Seats | Patto per l'Italia | be right | % | Seats | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Forza Italia - CCD | 8,136,135 | 21.01 | 132 | Partito Democratico della Sinistra | 7,881,646 | 20.36 | 124 | Partito Popolare Italiano | 4,287,172 | 11.07 | 33 | ||
Alleanza Nazionale | 5,214,133 | 13.47 | 110 | Partito della Rifondazione Comunista | 2,343,946 | 6.05 | 38 | Patto Segni | 1,811,814 | 4.68 | 13 | ||
Lega Nord | 3,235,248 | 8.36 | 118 | Federazione dei Verdi | 1,047,268 | 2.70 | 11 | South Tyrolean People's Party | 231,842 | 0.60 | 3 | ||
Lista Pannella | 1,359,283 | 3.51 | 6th | Partito Socialista Italiano | 849.429 | 2.19 | 14th | Vallée d'Aoste | direct candidates only | 1 | |||
Centro Cristiano Democratico | 2,646 | 0.01 | - | La Rete | 719.841 | 1.86 | 8th | ||||||
Alleanza Democratica | 456.114 | 1.18 | 18th | ||||||||||
All in all | 17,947,445 | 46.35 | 366 | All in all | 13.298.244 | 34.34 | 213 | All in all | 6,330,828 | 16.35 | 49 |
Others | be right | % | Seats |
---|---|---|---|
Lega d'Azione Meridionale | 59,873 | 0.15 | 1 |
Other | 1,084,503 | 2.80 | - |
All in all | 1,144,376 | 2.60 | 2 |
Election of the Senate
Polo delle Libertà Polo del Buon Governo |
be right | % | Seats | Alleanza dei Progressisti | be right | % | Seats | Patto per l'Italia | be right | % | Seats | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Lega Nord | 14.110.705 | 42.66 | 60 | Partito Democratico della Sinistra | 10,881,320 | 32.90 | 62 | Patto per l'Italia | 5,519,090 | 16.69 | 31 | ||
Alleanza Nazionale | 48 | Partito della Rifondazione Comunista | 18th | South Tyrolean People's Party | 217.137 | 0.66 | 3 | ||||||
Forza Italia | 33 | Partito Socialista Italiano | 9 | Vallée d'Aoste | 27,493 | 0.18 | 1 | ||||||
Centro Cristiano Democratico | 12 | Federazione dei Verdi | 7th | ||||||||||
Unione di Centro | 2 | Alleanza Democratica | 6th | ||||||||||
Lista Pannella | 1 | La Rete | 6th | ||||||||||
Cristiano Sociali | 6th | ||||||||||||
Federazione Laburista | 2 | ||||||||||||
Lista Magris | 61,400 | 0.19 | 1 | ||||||||||
All in all | 14.110.705 | 42.66 | 156 | All in all | 10,942,720 | 33.01 | 123 | All in all | 5,763,720 | 17.43 | 34 |
Others | be right | % | Seats |
---|---|---|---|
Lega Alpina Lumbarda | 246.046 | 0.74 | 1 |
Others | 2,011,358 | 6.08 | - |
All in all | 2,257,404 | 6.83 | 1 |
Winner and Loser
The Democrazia Cristiana , the dominant party in post-war history, which had been in government uninterruptedly and had provided almost all prime ministers, had renamed itself the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) shortly before the election . In the election, it lost almost two thirds of its votes (minus 18.6 percentage points) and more than four fifths of its seats in the Chamber of Deputies (from 206 to 33). That was the most significant loss of any party in an election in Italy and one of the most violent loss of a ruling party in any Western European country. Their previous coalition partners PSI (2.2%, a loss of 11.4 percentage points) and PSDI (0.5%, –2.2%) practically disappeared into insignificance. The two liberal parties of the post-war period had already dissolved ( PLI ) or no longer competed separately ( PRI ).
This contrasted with the election victory of the entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia (FI) party , which was founded just ten weeks before the election and came out of the blue with 21% (over 8 million party list votes). It did not yet have any real party structures or membership, but benefited from massive start-up support from Berlusconi's Fininvest group and a media campaign that was new to Italy in its television programs from the Mediaset group. Observers therefore spoke of an “instant party” or “party made of plastic”. Another big winner was the right-wing extremist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which ran under the name Alleanza Nazionale for the first time in this election . It benefited from discontent with the corruption scandals and from protests against them. In addition, there was a new image during this time, distancing itself from (neo) fascism (formally only at the Fiuggi party congress in January 1995) and instead endeavored to be perceived as a respectable, democratic and conservative party. From a marginalized party outside the “constitutional arc ” (arco costituzionale) it grew to the third strongest force in the country, which even gained a majority in some provinces in the south.
Government formation
The parties of the center-right camp (Polo delle Libertà / Polo del Buon Governo) formed a coalition government under Silvio Berlusconi . The Berlusconi I cabinet was sworn in on May 10, 1994. After just a few months, the coalition failed, the Lega Nord left the government alliance and formed a new majority with the center-left parties and the PPI. This brought the Dini cabinet , a so-called technocratic government (governo tecnico) made up of non-party experts, into office on January 17, 1995 . This held office until the early parliamentary elections in April 1996 .
literature
- Mario Caciagli: Suffrage reforms and party landscape . The Italian riddle. In: Democracy in Transition. Perspectives of an electoral reform. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, pp. 75–86.
- Nick Carter: Italy - The Demise of Post-War Partyocracy. In: Political Parties and the Collapse of the Old Orders. State University of New York Press, Albany 1998, pp. 71-94.
- Ilvo Diamanti, Renato Mannheimer (ed.): Milano a Roma. Guida all'Italia elettorale del 1994. Donzelli, Rome 1994.
- Isabel Kneisler: The Italian party system in transition. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011. Section 4.2.1. The Transformation Process in the Early 1990s - Cause and Effect , pp. 115–120.
- Simon Parker: Electoral reform and political change in Italy, 1991–1994. In: The New Italian Republic. From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi. Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 40-56.
- Markus Schäfer: Referendums, electoral law reforms and political actors in the structural change of the Italian party system. Lit Verlag, Münster 1998.
- Günter Trautmann: Elections and referendums in Italy in 1994 and 1995. In: Italy on the way to a “second republic”? The political development of Italy since 1992. Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, pp. 417-430.
Web links
Die Zeit / Hansjakob Stehle : The New Old Kungelei
Individual evidence
- ^ Italy, elections held in 1994. In: ipu.org . Retrieved October 26, 2018 .
- ↑ Carlo Ruzza, Stefano Fella: Re-inventing the Italian Right. Territorial politics, populism and 'post-fascism'. Routledge, 2009, p. 107.
- ^ Jonathan Hopkin, Piero Ignazi: Newly governing parties in Italy. Comparing the PDS / DS, Lega Nord and Forza Italia. In: New Parties in Government. In power for the first time. Routledge, 2008, p. 57.
- ↑ Ilvo Diamanti: Dal partito di plastica alla Repubblica Fondata sui media. In: Comunicazione Politica , Volume 5, No. 1, 2004, pp. 51-64.
- ↑ Paolo Gianfelici: "Forza Italia" or "Forza Berlusconi"? Comments on a New Party Model. In: Italy on the move - an interim balance. ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Arguments and materials on current affairs, Volume 37, Hanns Seidel Foundation, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-88795-252-9 , p. 48.