Giorgia Meloni, the useful vote: the secret weapon against General Vannacci | Libero Quotidiano.it

None of them will admit it, but on Wednesday evening, at Giorgia Meloni’s house, she, Matteo Salvini, Antonio Tajani, and Maurizio Lupi did not just exchange holiday greetings and review the priorities to address upon their return. They also talked about Roberto Vannacci. And therefore about the possibility of changing the electoral law on the fly and introducing a two-round system. The general and the runoff seem like two distinct topics, but they are the same discussion. It is he, competing from the right with Lega and Brothers of Italy, who puts the current majority at a crossroads: with runoffs or without? The leaders gathered at the Torrino house agreed: without. There are many reasons, but the main one is the leverage of the “useful vote,” thanks to which – they say Meloni is the most convinced – Vannacci’s numbers at the polls will be very different from those assigned to him by the polls.

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The two-round system “reduces political blackmail,” says Senator Marcello Pera, one of the few on the right pushing for this solution. And Vannacci’s blackmail is evident: either you ally with me on my terms (including Putinism), or you lose. Current polls seem to make the threat credible. In the “super average” of the YouTrend institute, his party is rated at 7.1%. The same numbers say that the center-right (Fdi, Lega, Forza Italia, and Noi Moderati) would stop at 41.6%. While the so-called “broad field” (Pd, Five Stars, Avs, Italia Viva, and +Europa) would reach 44.3%. If voting took place with the electoral law under discussion in parliament, such a result would assign the majority prize to the left. Elly Schlein, Giuseppe Conte, and company would thus have control of both Chambers and a serious mortgage on the election of Sergio Mattarella’s successor, the great event of the next legislature.

Things would not be very different with the current law: the votes that Vannacci would take from the center-right would guarantee victory to the broad field in most single-member constituencies, where it is decided who governs. The result would be very similar to that of 2022, but with reversed roles: back then, the left was divided. Assigning the majority prize to whoever wins the runoff, instead, would allow the center-right to present itself alone, without being conditioned by Vannacci, and recover in the second round the voters who voted for him in the first: if not all, a good part. This, at least, is what the proponents of the two-round system think. Among them, however, there is no one among the center-right leaders.

The reasoning on which the four agreed is very different. First of all, if Vannacci joined the coalition, he would not bring all the votes credited to him. He would lose a share of his following and scare away many Forza Italia voters, who would go towards Carlo Calenda and Matteo Renzi (provided Tajani’s party manages to withstand cohabitation with Futuro Nazionale). In short, it is wrong to algebraically add the votes of the government coalition with those of Vannacci. Moreover, even if Fn joined the coalition, it would not stop draining votes from Lega and Fdi: the competition would continue and would not be very different from the war of attrition that Conte is waging against Schlein.

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A system with a runoff, above all, would blunt the weapon with which the premier and her allies are convinced they can reduce Vannacci in a single electoral round: the appeal to the useful vote. How many will really vote for Fn, if they understand that by doing so they will help give control of parliament to Pd, M5S, and allies? It will not be an easy message to get across. But there is political space to make this operation, and the polls indicate it is not small. The analysis of Vannacci’s electorate made by the Ipsos institute of Nando Pagnoncelli and published a month ago by Corriere della Sera shows that more than half of them, 55.4%, view the Meloni government and its work positively. It is hard to believe that these people, faced with the alternative between choosing the general by sending the governing right to the opposition and voting for the second term of an executive they say they appreciate, will massively choose the first option.

The president of Fdi and her allies are therefore convinced that the disadvantages of the two-round system outweigh the advantages, and that the challenge with the left can be played better without tying hands and feet to the pro-Russian military man. All the more so against an alliance in which every day Schlein, Conte, Bonelli, and Fratoianni compete to push more on the extreme side, leaving moderate voters unrepresented. And always waiting to see what Alessandro Di Battista will do, who is considering becoming the Vannacci of the broad field. With a footnote that those present at the discussion at Meloni’s house know very well: every reasoning holds as long as Vannacci’s numbers do not deviate too much from the current ones. But if after the summer the polls credited him with double-digit percentages, the strategy towards him would necessarily have to be revised.

For this reason, at Wednesday’s summit, an agreement was stamped to present a unified amendment in the Senate introducing preferences, along the lines of the one already rejected in the Chamber with a secret vote. The only difference: after the top candidate, the next candidate must be of a different sex. But if – as it seems – gender alternation among the same top candidates is not introduced, dissatisfaction among female parliamentarians will remain. It will be discussed again in the Senate committee at the beginning of September, when the amendments arrive. The goal is to approve the new electoral law in October: before the start of the budget session and in time to go to the polls in mid-April, as seems likely.

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