Regionals in Lazio and Lombardy: here are the candidates and how to vote

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Lombardy and Lazio will vote on Sunday 12 (from 7 to 23) and Monday 13 February (from 7 to 15) to renew the regional council and elect the president of the Region. In Lombardy, the main candidates will be the outgoing Northern League governor Attilio Fontana (Brothers of Italy, Lega, Forza Italia), Pierfrancesco Majorino of the Democratic Party (also with the support of M5s, the Verdi-Left Alliance) and Letizia Moratti, former vice president of the Region led by Fontana and now supported by the Third Pole. In Lazio the main names in the running are the former president of the Red Cross Francesco Rocca (FdI, Lega, Fi), the outgoing councilor for health of the Zingaretti council, Alessio D’Amato (Pd and third pole), and the journalist Rai Donatella Bianchi (M5s),

The voting system

The “progenitor” norm of the regional electoral laws is the Tatarella law of 1995: direct election of the president and regional council elected with a proportional system corrected by a majority bonus which rewards the lists in support of the winning presidential candidate. Then, after the reform of Title V of 2001, the Regions had the right to change their voting system. And Lazio and Lombardy corrected their electoral laws ahead of the 2018 vote.

Direct election (no runoff)

In Lazio and Lombardy, the candidate for governor who gets the most votes is elected president. Without ballot, as instead for the mayors where to be elected in the first round you need to exceed 50% of the votes otherwise you go to a second round between the first two candidates who have obtained the most votes. Both in Lazio and in Lombardy it is envisaged that the second-ranking candidate for president is immediately elected to the regional council.

The election of the regional council in Lombardy

For the election of the council, the territory of the region (both in Lazio and in Lombardy) is divided into as many colleges as there are provinces. In each constituency there are governor candidates with the list (or coalition lists) of regional councilor candidates who support them. In Lombardy, the lists that support the winning gubernatorial candidate obtain the 55% of the seats (proportionately distributed) if the gubernatorial candidate gets less than 40% of the vote; if he gets more than 40% of the seats they go up to 60% (but the lists that support the candidate elected governor cannot obtain more than 70% of the seats).

The election of the regional council in Lazio

In Lazio, however, the system is simpler: the lists that support the new governor get a bonus of 10 seats (out of 50) distributed proportionally. In Lazio, as in Lombardy, corrections are envisaged to ensure that each province elects at least one councilor. The seat bonus does not always guarantee the governor a majority (the so-called lame duck), as happened for Nicola Zingaretti in 2018: the better performance of the centre-right lists compared to the centre-left guaranteed the latter only 24 seats out of 50 at the beginning of the term. But the president, being elected directly by the citizens, does not need a vote of board confidence to take office. Zingaretti also managed to reject a motion of no confidence, due to divisions in the opposition, until the agreement with the M5S managed to lock down the council.