New electoral law 'Italicum' to drag Italy out of decades of coalition chaos
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi delivers a speech during for an event of his party Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) in Bologna, Italy, 03 May 2015 (EPA Photo)

Italy's parliament gave final approval on Monday to a new electoral law, dubbed Italicum, proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to provide political stability in the country and to ensure stable governments able to last a full five-year term.



Italy's new electoral system approved in parliament on Monday (dubbed Italicum) is expected to end Italy's decades-long coalition chaos. As per the new law, the party which gains at least 40 percent of the total votes wil be the ruling party in power, after automatically being given a winner's bonus which will give it 340 seats in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. The party will thereby be granted an automatic 55-per-cent majority to election winners.Italy Prime Minister Renzi said that the new law will end the backroom horse trading between parties often needed to form coalition governments in Italy."There will be a system in which our country will finally be a point of reference for political stability which is a precondition for economic and cultural development," Renzi said on Monday.Renzi said Italy, one of the world's slowest growing economies, has had 63 governments since World War Two but that none had been strong or durable enough to push through core reforms, despite wide recognition that change was needed.According to the law, parties that get less than 3 percent of the vote will be excluded from the parliament, and if no party wins 40 percent, a run-off ballot between the two largest parties will be held two weeks after the first election to determine which party gets the winner's bonus.Until 2002, Turkey was not unfamiliar with the multi-party coalition government, which had led to serious political and economic instabilities. However, with the AK Party's coming into power in 2002, the decades-long trend has changed. The AK Pary won 363 parliamentary seats with just 34.3 percent of the votes in that year. The 2002 election produced Turkey's first single party government since 1987 and the country's first two-party parliament since 1960. And since that time, AK Party has been gaining enough votes to ensure its dominancy as a single party government, passing the 276 threshold of seats.