by Marco Pannella---------
Following is an excerpt of an article in which Marco Pannella once again deals with the need to carry out urgent reforms in Italy of the electoral system in an Anglo-Saxon sense, to get rid of a party power which is destroying democracy at a growing pace. This article was published on "Radical News" of 29 January 1986.
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(...) We should carry out a reform of the electoral system, adopting the uninominal, Anglo-Saxon one. With that system, the first past the post, fighting with legal and equal weapons, is the one elected, and that is all. The candidates will thus be candidates for elections and for Government, not for a "representation" of an apparatus or of an ideology.
I know the array of objections and fears: but I (...) agree with Duverger and - for once - also with Mendès-France. I am for Anglo-Saxon democracy, not for continental one, in its different embodiments which have been experiencing cyclical or permanent crises for too long, especially the proportional ones. I am, in other words, for a governmental democracy, not a "representation" democracy. I am for the function of freedom of the "great" Fabian leagues or of the "great" civil rights movements, not for small parliamentary groups, which are a means to finance and State-control everything and everyone, wealthy sects that destroy ideological revolutions and any civil ferment and movement, while they consume regime functions and meals on behalf of those "personages" whom they think they can oppose and influence.
We must start somewhere: clearly, the electoral system and the pattern of governmental political democracy and alternation are not everything, they cannot in themselves cover the "global" necessities for a reform...On the other hand, had we not started with "modest" divorce...(...).