Senate Passes Electoral Reform, and Molise Counts What It Loses

Italy's Senate approved the latest version of a draft law designed to overhaul the country's voting system on Tuesday, with the bill now passing to the Chamber of Deputies, according to The Local Italy. The outlet described the reform as controversial. That is as far as the foreign wire goes: the text of the bill, its thresholds and its mechanism are not set out in international coverage, and La Veduta does not fill that gap from Italian sources.

The Local Italy's Tuesday roundup listed the Senate vote alongside a strike by general practitioners over new rules, in a week the outlet had already flagged as heavy with parliamentary business. The same roundup series has carried the electoral reform as a running item since the weekend, when the outlet's weekly agenda placed the Senate vote at the top of what to expect in Italy.

What the wire does not say is what the reform would do to a region of 289,000 people. Electoral systems decide how many seats a territory sends to Rome, and Molise has spent decades on the wrong side of that arithmetic. The region is the smallest in the country by population, and its representation has been a recurring subject of foreign coverage of Italian depopulation rather than of Italian party politics.