Italian Elections and Politics 2022 - Our Time to Schlein

[Antonio the Sixth]

Well ouch. With Sweden it seems that Europe is shifting right.

Both Italy and Sweden had migrant controversies, could this be more backlash?

Immigration was a bigger issue in 2018 than this year (in Italy definitely, and I think in Sweden too)

[Antonio the Sixth]

Neo-fascists win the honor of presiding over a possibly catastrophic economic crisis. As someone who enjoys drinking out of poisoned chalices, I am very envious! 

That's nothing to celebrate. Fascists are masters in exploiting crises to consolidate power.

[Antonio the Sixth]

La7 guy now saying Lega is trending further down from its original estimate.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Sky/YouTrend exit poll
Senate:
House:

What is Estero?

Others. Almost certainly the German regionalist party in Trentino/Sudtirol.

No, estero means "abroad". They're probably referring to parties like MAIE and USEI.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Sezioni are precincts. Small municipalities have just one precinct each, while the bigger ones like Rome and Milan have many.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Absolutely terrible results for both Lega and PD. Absolutely wild for M5S given the circumstances.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Neo-fascists win the honor of presiding over a possibly catastrophic economic crisis. As someone who enjoys drinking out of poisoned chalices, I am very envious! 

That's nothing to celebrate. Fascists are masters in exploiting crises to consolidate power.

Does Italy have any emergency powers clause Meloni could invoke?

Thankfully no. We'll have to see if they'll be able to unilaterally change the constitution, but if these results hold they will not.

[Antonio the Sixth]

La7 projects 105-125 seats for the right in the Senate. That's a pretty wide range so it's really not much of a prediction.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So in the Senate, the Right is almost certain to win at least 54 seats out of 74. M5S is well placed to get 5, and the left (including SVP lol) another 5. Another 10 are still floating around, though in most of them the right is behind.

On the PR side, the right should probably win 55-60 seats. So probably 110 to 120 is where the Senate will end up when all is said and done.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Final La7 has the Right at 44.1 and the Left at 26.4 for the Senate.

[Antonio the Sixth]

About 50% of precincts have reported for the Senate. Here's the breakdown by region:

Liguria 82%
TAA 78%
Umbria 77%
FVG 74%
Emilia-Romagna 72%
VdA 69%
Marche 67%
Toscana 67%
Puglia 62%
Veneto 60%
Piemonte 60%
Molise 57%
NATIONWIDE 52%
Campania 49%
Abruzzo 49%
Lazio 49%
Basilicata 43%
Calabria 39%
Sardegna 37%
Lombardia 36%
Sicilia 19%

So there's a lot left, mainly from the South but also from Lazio and Lombardy. The Red Regions once again have shot their load early, so we can probably expect the right to gain a bit, but especially M5S to grow.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So in the Senate, the Right is almost certain to win at least 54 seats out of 74. M5S is well placed to get 5, and the left (including SVP lol) another 5. Another 10 are still floating around, though in most of them the right is behind.

On the PR side, the right should probably win 55-60 seats. So probably 110 to 120 is where the Senate will end up when all is said and done.

La7 says between 114 and 122. Close enough, I guess. We'll see where it ends up exactly. The right looks actually set to sweep all the Rome seats, so that would shift a couple seats around.

[Antonio the Sixth]

So with the current leads the right is on track to win 58 of the 74 Senate seats (they've pulled ahead in VdA too). We'll see how many PR seats they win in the end (if they keep inching up they could get to 59 or 60) but either way I don't think 122 is likely. Either way still a great result, of course.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The reporting is starting to slow to a trickle, but we're at about 2/3 for the Senate.

VdA 100%
Liguria 91%
FVG 90%
Umbria 87%
TAA 86%
Toscana 84%
ER 84%
Marche 83%
Puglia 79%
Veneto 76%
Molise 71%
Piemonte 75%
Campania 67%
Abruzzo 65%
Basilicata 64%
Lazio 64%
Calabria 58%
Lombardia 54%
Sardegna 52%
Sicilia 34%

Lombardy and Sicily are the two big shoes still to drop. Both should heavily favor the right, though Sicily results are really bizarre. Also lots of votes left in Lazio, and especially in its most heavily right-wing parts.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Also La7 has its final projection for the House at 230 to 244. Again quite a margin.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The right pulled ahead in the Messina seat where the De Luca independent was ahead for a while. They also look poised to eventually overtake M5S in the Foggia one. That could actually put them at 61 FPP seats. Given how they're doing percentage-wise, that actually pretty much guarantees 120 seats right there.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The right pulled ahead in the Messina seat where the De Luca independent was ahead for a while. They also look poised to eventually overtake M5S in the Foggia one. That could actually put them at 61 FPP seats. Given how they're doing percentage-wise, that actually pretty much guarantees 120 seats right there.

Well, they have pulled ahead in the Foggia seat, but the random indy is back in the lead in Messina. Who the hell knows what ends up happening there.

[Antonio the Sixth]

For the House, it looks like the right is also ahead in 120 FPP seats. They're gonna get at least 116 PR seats, and maybe as many as 118. So the upper bound is probably 240 there as well.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Letta is leaving the PD leadership.

https://twitter.com/Radio1Rai/status/1574347116767576070

"Unsatisfactory result. In the next few days we will bring together the party organs to speed up the path that will lead to a congress. I will not re-run as a candidate. This legislature will be the most right-wing"

Good f**king riddance. Not that I have much hope that his successor will be an improvement...

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anyway, it looks like the dust has settled on 59 FPP seats for the right in the Senate, and 121 in the House. It looks like they were a lot luckier with marginal seats in the House for some reason.

PR-wise, they look set to get 57 in the Senate (off-chance of 58) and 115 in the House, along with 2 expat seats. So this all adds up to 116 seats in the Senate (58%) and 238 in the House (59.5%). The largest majorities for the right in the whole Republican history, if I'm remembering right. Although thankfully still a far cry from the most pessimistic predictions.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anyway, it looks like the dust has settled on 59 FPP seats for the right in the Senate, and 121 in the House. It looks like they were a lot luckier with marginal seats in the House for some reason.

PR-wise, they look set to get 57 in the Senate (off-chance of 58) and 115 in the House, along with 2 expat seats. So this all adds up to 116 seats in the Senate (58%) and 238 in the House (59.5%). The largest majorities for the right in the whole Republican history, if I'm remembering right. Although thankfully still a far cry from the most pessimistic predictions.

I don't think the right was luckier with marginals in the Chamber (after all the difference between 121 and 59×2 is just 3), I believe the difference is largely due to the weird system that made Trentino-Südtirol have more FPTP seats in the Senate.

I haven't done a systematic breakdown (I'll try to get to it soon!), but anecdotally while browsing through the House results I saw a lot of right-wing wins by less than 2 points. By contrast there were only 2 such wins in the Senate (one in Trentino hilariously, and another in Foggia against M5S).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Slightly random question, but is there any reason Aosta still maintains it's big regionalist vote?

I mean for all the "French/Arpitan" stuff the region is still very overwhelmingly Italian speaking in practice and doesn't rseem to really have the big cultural distinctiveness that South Tyrol does

It's absolutely culturally distinctive, and plenty of people do speak French or Patois. I mean maybe not as much as Alto Adige, but more so than Trentino.

The political distinctiveness is mostly inherited and/or a product of the region's special status encouraging local thinking. It has eroded somewhat in the past decade (Lega getting the regional presidency was a grim milestone) but I don't think it will disappear anytime soon.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Interior Ministry published a (tentative, since there are still a few dozen unreported precincts) distribution of PR seats, which gives 114 seats to the right in the House and 56 in the Senate - one fewer than I estimated in each. Not sure if the results moved a bit since I last calculated them or if I didn't use the right formula, but either way, worth noting.

FI gets 22 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate - so far not enough to be decisive in either, but we'll have to see who the winners of FPP districts are. FI needs 16 more in the House and 7 more in the Senate, so well within reach.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Interior Ministry published a (tentative, since there are still a few dozen unreported precincts) distribution of PR seats, which gives 114 seats to the right in the House and 56 in the Senate - one fewer than I estimated in each. Not sure if the results moved a bit since I last calculated them or if I didn't use the right formula, but either way, worth noting.

How are the PR seats doled out again? If I remember right they still have constituencies but... it's done nationally? So are the number of seats worked out nationally and then just filled out at constituency level without having to align with votes cast in them, or...?

I'm pretty sure the party distribution is national for the House (they are still broken down by constituency, but only after the national party distribution). In the Senate, I'm not sure. It's possible they're still allotted regionally, which would explain FI's relative underperformance (higher effective threshold).

[Antonio the Sixth]

To play devil's advocate, the basic idea here actually makes a lot of sense: you assign within a constituency the seats that parties are actually entitled to based on their results, and send the remaining votes to a higher geographic tier so that you can do another proportional allocation there. That way, as many seats as possible are assigned at the most local level while still ensuring overall proportionality. It's a very elegant concept, and iirc one that's been used in Denmark with great success.

The thing is that it makes no sense within the broader context of Italy's insane electoral system, which doesn't give a sh*t either about proportionality or local representation. Here it's just some pointless, ridiculous complication.