Only 186 women, out of 600 seats available, were elected to the policies of 25 September, just 31% of the total, while the men will instead be 414. It is the first time since 2001 that this percentage decreases between one election and another, after it was reached in the past legislature the highest figure ever recorded, equal to 35.3% with 334 women out of 945 seats. This is confirmed by the data from the Ministry of the Interior, reported by the Eligendo platform, relating to the list of all the people elected during the last electoral round. The responsibility for this decrease depends both on the electoral law and on the choices of the parties.
According to what is established by the so-called Rosatellum, a single gender cannot represent more than 60% of the total candidacies presented by a coalition or from a list. So if there are 10 applications, there cannot be more than 6 men or 6 women. Furthermore, in multi-member constituencies with blocked lists, candidates and candidates must alternate. However, according to the results of the analysis of the lists made by La Voce, the parties managed to easily circumvent these limitations.
The electoral law, in fact, provides for the so-called pluricandidature, for which a single candidate or candidate can compete in a maximum of five multi-member constituencies as well as in a single-member constituency. Thanks to this mechanism, many parties have simply distributed their candidates in as many multi-member constituencies as possible, to comply with the criterion of alternating genders. While having male candidates in abundance, these were presented in fewer colleges.
In this way, male nominations were favored, because the person at the top of the list can only be elected in one college, but if the should his party win in more constituencies, the seats will be assigned to the next name in the plurinominal block list, ie a masculine name, based on the principle of alternating genders. Thus, by nominating only two women as leaders in 10 multi-member colleges and 10 men in second place, a party can elect only 2 women but as many as 8 men, while respecting gender alternation. According to the analysis of La Voce, the parties that used this stratagem the most were the Brothers of Italy and the League.