April 28, 1963 1968 → 18.5%, 6 seats 18.5%, 7 seats 10 8 | 44.8%, 16 seats 18.5%, 6 seats 19 10 3 4 | |
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Lombardy elected its third delegation to the Italian Senate on April 28, 1963. This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1963 even if, according to the Italian Constitution, every senatorial challenge in each Region is a single and independent race.
Contents
The election was won by the centrist Christian Democracy, as it happened at national level. Eight Lombard provinces gave a majority or at least a plurality to the winning party, while the agricultural Province of Pavia preferred the Italian Communist Party.
Background
The constitution reform of 1963 created dozens of new senatorial seats to improve the representation of minor parties, but the proportional voting system did not impose changes into the total number of local constituencies. The result was that the Italian Christian Democracy elected the major part of its nominees even if it was weaked by Amintore Fanfani's program to create a centre-left government with the Italian Socialist Party. If the DC paied its toll to the centre-leftist Liberal Party, which obtained great results in the bourgeois centre of Milan, the PSI lost votes to the Communist Party, and later it suffered a crisis losing his leftist wing, including senator Giuseppe Roda, which created the Soviet-aligned PSIUP.
Electoral system
The electoral system for the Senate was a strange hybrid which established a form of proportional representation into FPTP-like constituencies. A candidate needed a landslide victory of more than 65% of votes to obtain a direct mandate. All constituencies where this result was not reached entered into an at-large calculation based upon the D'Hondt method to distribute the seats between the parties, and candidates with the best percentages of suffrages inside their party list were elected.
Results
Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior