Meloni's Parliament Just Rewrote Italy's Electoral Law, and the Fight Over Whether It Survives Court Review Is Just Starting

Italy's parliament gave final approval this week to an overhaul of the country's electoral law, handing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni a political win ahead of the 2027 elections while opening a legal fight that could outlast the celebration. The reform passed 227 to 164 and does two specific things, it awards a bonus of parliamentary seats in both chambers to whichever coalition wins at least 42 percent of the national vote, and it requires every coalition, or any party running alone, to publicly name its candidate for prime minister before voters go to the polls.

The stated goal is the one Italian governments have chased for decades, stability. A country that has cycled through roughly 70 governments since the end of the war has repeatedly tried to engineer electoral systems that produce a clear winner and a working majority rather than the fragile coalitions that have defined most of its postwar history. A seat bonus tied to a vote share threshold, combined with pre election clarity about who would actually become prime minister, is meant to turn an Italian election into something closer to a single choice between two outcomes.

The opposition does not dispute the goal so much as the method and the timing. Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein dismissed the reform with a line meant to sound unbothered rather than alarmed, go ahead and change the electoral law, she said, we will win in any case under any voting system, while centre left lawmakers more broadly accused the government of forcing through new rules against the opposition's will barely a year before the country votes under them.

That timing is exactly what makes a court challenge likely. Italy's constitutional court has twice in the past decade struck down electoral laws that handed outsized seat bonuses to the top finisher, ruling that distortions of that scale conflict with how faithfully parliament is meant to represent how people actually voted. Critics of this reform are making a version of the same argument now, that a bonus large enough to matter is, by definition, a bonus large enough to misrepresent the electorate, and that the courts have already drawn that line once.

Whatever happens next, Meloni has what she wanted on paper, a law that could turn a coalition win in the low 40s into a governing majority, heading into an election her government has more reason than most recent Italian governments to actually want to fight under a system built for a decisive result. Whether that law is still standing by the time Italians vote in 2027 is now a question for the courts rather than for parliament.