10 March 2007

Council of Ministers: Electoral Law

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“March 8th is International Women’s Day. So I send my greetings and respect also from Italia dei Valori, with the commitment to create the conditions so that women can express their full potential.
With reference to women in politics I want to talk about a topic that is now of interest to the media and will be in the next few months: the electoral law. And I would add: the transparency and morality of those who make up the institutions, starting with Parliament.
In a representative democracy like ours, we have to delegate to some people the management of the Public Good, starting with the Local Authorities, and going on to the Provinces, the Regions the Italian Parliament and the European Parliament. Thus it comes spontaneously to reaffirm what has been said many times by Beppe Grillo in his Blog: those who represent the citizens are their employees and must therefore give an account of their activities.
Today, we find a break down in the relationship of trust between those who are represented and their representatives because the electoral law is such that the citizens only have a formal duty: to put a cross on the symbol of a party that they think could be OK for ideological reasons, because of their programme manifesto or because within that party there’s a person that they like. Whoever is elected, however, is not a person chosen directly by the elector but by the secretary of the party.
The first thing to be done to correct this anomaly is to allow the citizens to express their preference and to choose their own candidates.
There’s even an issue before that: who chooses the candidates? Here again it is the secretary of the party. This shows us the need for Primaries. Thus what is needed is an electoral law that gives the citizen the possibility to be a judge and to vote for their own representatives and to send them home when they are no longer wanted. But people are prone to presenting only their good points and not their defects.
Thus, we need to establish a rule of morality. Exclusion from being elected. We in Italia dei Valori want to take this forward: people who have been convicted, at least for crimes that are serious, cannot be candidates.
Furthermore, even though Italia dei Valori is a tiny party, we want an end to the proliferation of parties even if it means we disappear, if that is necessary. What’s needed is an electoral law that reduces the political fragmentation.
Once more, we want the citizen to be able to choose the candidate to be leader. It’s not acceptable that the party that is chosen then goes with others and adopts policies that are different from those for which they were elected.
The coalitions must be identified before the elections, not after.
In relation to this, we also want it to be made impossible for an elected person to fly away to the other side. Citizens trust a person. If this person betrays them they must be declared no longer elected because they are not acting in the interests of their employers.
These are going to be the battles that I and Italia dei Valori will be fighting in the next few months in Parliament and in the country. To have a new set of people at the top with clean hands, who can be chosen by the voters and who have new faces, not just new logos.”

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Information