News Analysis: Italian electoral reform bill passed, but with cost

Matteo Renzi's decision to push through his electoral reform plan with a series of three risky confidence votes follows a controversial and infrequently-used path that until now has ended badly for the prime minister behind the votes.

Renzi, Italy's prime minister for the last 15 months, won the three votes despite an emboldened opposition movement within his own political party. The margin of victory was high -- 342 votes in favor, just 15 against -- but it came after around three dozen members of Renzi's party abstained from the vote and several more voted in favor after voicing their protests to the use of the measure.

A confidence vote forces lawmakers to vote for or against a proposal without debate and knowing that if it fails, the government must resign.

Renato Brunetta, from the official opposition group in parliament, called the decision a show of "Renzi fascism," and several other critics labeled the move "anti-democratic."

At the heart of the controversy is the fact that a reform that changes the way Italy's democratic system works was passed without the normal debate and assessment that accompanies most measures negotiated in parliament.

There is also a fear that, when combined with Renzi's reform to downgrade the influence of Italy's Senate, now the upper house of parliament, it will make it too easy for a single political party to dominate Italian politics in the future. That was the case from the end of World War II until the early 1990s when deep corruption led to the "clean hands" scandal that dramatically reshaped Italian politics and, according to pollsters, significantly eroded confidence in elected officials.

Barring a referendum to repeal the law, the plan will go into effect starting in July 2016. It will award bonus parliamentary seats to the political party earning the most votes in order to create a more stable majority. If no party gains at least 40 percent of the vote in parliamentary election, a second round of voting between the top two parties will determine which earns the bonus seats.

It is not clear how it will play out if, in the next election, Renzi's party earns the bonus seats but it remains divided.

"The vote was won, but with a cost," said Mattia Guidi, a political science expert with Rome's LUISS University, told Xinhua. "The cost isn't that it may make Renzi's government collapse. But I think taking this step will make some critics within his party even more verbal, more determined."

Luca Verzichelli, a professor of political science at the University of Siena, agreed.

"Some critics say that what Renzi did was illegal, but it was perfectly legal," Verzichelli said in an interview. "It might not have passed without the confidence vote, and so now it will be interesting to see how the reform is perceived."

There is a precedent that says it could be perceived badly. Renzi's initiative is the first electoral reform to be passed via confidence vote since 1953, when Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi used a similar vote for a reform so distained it was called the "legge truffa" -- the fraudulent law. It was repealed a year later.

Before that, it happened in the 1920s under Benito Mussolini, part of a wide array of reforms that helped build the foundation for the powerful fascist government that pulled Italy into World War II. Endit