With 227 votes in favor and 164 against, the Chamber definitively approved the new electoral law, renamed Stabilicum (or Melonellum by the opposition parties) which will be applied to the next general elections, scheduled for 2027. The electoral reform approved today, 8 October 2026, introduces a proportional system with a strong majority bonus: the coalition that obtains at least 42% of the votes (both in the House and the Senate) will be allocated 70 additional seats in the Chamber and 35 additional seats in the Senate, a significant number.
The law also provides for the partial return of preferences (with the list leaders blocked) and thresholds for parties and coalitions. The mechanisms to guarantee gender equality, provided for by the previous law, are more limited. Coalitions and parties are finally obliged to indicate the name of the prime minister candidate (who however will not appear on the ballot). Important news also for non-residents: article 8, in fact, recognizes the possibility for non-resident voters to vote in political and European elections, as well as referendums, a right also extended to caregiver family members.
The new electoral law has sparked heated controversy from the opposition (and some discontent even within the majority that approved it), especially due to the risk of political instability in the event that no coalition reaches 42%.
What is Stabilicum and how does it work
The new electoral law is based on a proportional mechanism: the seats in the House and Senate are distributed proportionally based on the votes that the coalitions and parties obtain. The law, however, provides for a strong majority bonus: the coalition that reaches at least 42% in both the House and the Senate obtains a bonus of 70 deputies and 35 additional senators, in addition to those already elected proportionally. If no coalition reaches 42% of the votes, the majority prize is not awarded and all seats are assigned proportionally. This is an important number of seats: just think that, after the constitutional reform to cut the number of parliamentarians which came into force in 2020, the seats in the Chamber of Deputies went from 630 to 400, while those in the Senate of the Republic dropped from 315 to 200.
More in detail, as reported by the Official Dossier of the Electoral Reform, of the 400 seats in the Chamber, 8 go to the Abroad constituency, 7 to Trentino-Alto Adige, 1 to Valle d’Aosta and 70 constitute the prize: in practice, therefore, 314 seats remain to be distributed in proportion to the votes. Assuming that a coalition reaches 42% of the votes (and that there are no votes dispersed below the thresholds) it would obtain 42% of those 314 seats, approximately 132. Added to these are the 70 seats of the prize, for a total of approximately 202 (excluding the seats in the Estero constituency, Valle d’Aosta and Trentino Alto-Adige).
Same operation for the Senate: of the 200 total senators, 4 belong to Abroad, 1 to Valle d’Aosta, 6 to Trentino Alto-Adige and 35 are the prize. The seats to be distributed proportionally, therefore, are 154: 42% is equivalent to approximately 65 seats, which added to the 35 of the prize lead to approximately 100 senators, to which those elected in special constituencies and abroad could be added.
In any case, the electoral law sets the maximum number of seats attributable to the winning coalition in the Chamber at 220 deputies and at 113 senators in the Senate.
The law provides that voters can express up to three preferences, but the list leaders are blocked: each party chooses its own list leader, who will in any case be the first of those elected, regardless of the voters’ decision. The thresholds, however, are set at 10% for coalitions, 3% for parties not forming part of coalitions.
Furthermore, each coalition or party must indicate the name of the candidate for the Presidency of the Council when presenting the symbol. However, the name will not be present on the ballot (the fact that a party or coalition can decide to include the name in its symbol, as often happens, has nothing to do with the law) because, according to the Constitution, the role must be conferred by the President of the Republic: voters do not directly choose the government and its president.
With the stabilicum/melonellum the vote will be held in 2027, barring interventions by the Constitutional Court which could cancel the law in whole or in part if it were found to violate the Constitution.
Pros and cons: the controversies of the opposition and the responses of the majority
The new electoral law has sparked heated controversy for various reasons. First of all, the timing has been contested: the opposition claims that approving a new electoral law less than a year after the vote serves the interests of the current majority and risks compromising democratic guarantees.
Various criticisms have also been leveled against the strong majority premium, which, according to detractors, does not guarantee adequate representation and, combined with the blocked lead-list principle, leaves parties great discretion in the choice of deputies and senators.
In this regard, a clarification is necessary on electoral systems, which are divided into two main types: proportional and majoritarian. Generally speaking, the proportional system assigns seats in Parliament in proportion to the votes obtained by the parties or coalition of parties: a party that obtains 10% of the votes will have 10% of the seats and so on. Often the proportional system provides for a threshold, i.e. a minimum level that parties must reach to obtain seats, necessary to avoid excessive fragmentation (but sometimes used to limit representation). In many cases, proportional representation also includes a majority bonus: the party or coalition of parties that obtains the most votes is entitled to a bonus in terms of seats, in order to guarantee that there is a solid and stable majority in parliament.
The majority system, on the other hand, assigns seats to the candidates or to the list that obtain the most votes in a given constituency: whoever obtains the most votes is elected, while all the others remain outside parliament and the votes they have obtained are dispersed. The majority can be a single round or involve a run-off (after the first round, the two candidates who obtained the most votes compete again). When each constituency elects only one candidate, the system is called single-member.
In a nutshell: the proportional system favors representativeness, better reflecting the voters’ vote, the majoritarian system favors governability, producing clearer and more solid parliamentary majorities.
The majority bonus included in the current law should help governability, while according to the opposition it will prevent parliament from fully reflecting the will of the voters.
Other controversies arose due to the fact that, compared to the previous law, the principle of alternation between men and women is severely limited: according to the opposition, this would risk drastically reducing the number of women present in parliament.
According to some scholars of constitutional law, the electoral law could be partially considered unconstitutional, because it provides for the nomination of the candidate for prime minister, a task which instead falls to the President of the Republic.
The promoters of the electoral law, on the contrary, reject the accusations, arguing that it serves to give stability to the country, preventing the elections from ending with “draws” and therefore making the creation of a stable majority in Parliament more complex, with important repercussions on the governability of the country.
