Italians Say <i> Basta</i> and Vote to Throw the Rascals Out : Referendum: Incensed by scandals, citizens attack bureaucracy and demand new electoral laws.

Basta! Enough! Rebelling against political impasse and institutionalized corruption, exasperated Italians voted overwhelmingly in a historic national referendum Monday to throw the rascals out.

Voters in a slash-and-burn mood bluntly ordered disgraced Italian politicians to rewrite electoral rules that have conserved political power in the same hands for 50 years.

Insurgent voters took no prisoners. They summarily cut off state funds to political parties, and they assaulted Italy’s featherbedded government bureaucracy, abolishing three ministries. Thousands of jubilant Si voters cheered away the soft spring night Monday at a victory rally in Rome’s baroque Piazza Navona.

“This is the victory of millions of people who have chosen the future with their own hands,” said Mario Segni, a low-profile renegade from the political Establishment who launched the referendum movement.

Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, the self-proclaimed lame-duck leader of a besieged government, conferred with President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro as the lopsided totals stunned--and delighted--most Italians; stock prices soared; the lira rallied.

Parliament today will debate the future of Amato’s 10-month-old coalition government, while Scalfaro interviews a number of putative prime ministers before deciding whom to ask to form a new government. In the flux, Amato may well be asked to succeed himself as head of a government whose first priority would be to enact new electoral laws and to call an election under them.

In all, the massive protest vote approved eight major reforms and effectively wrote the epitaph for the political system that has borne Italy from postwar poverty to industrial wealth--and unprecedented scandal.

“This marks the beginning of the Second Republic, with the people taking over politics,” said Giorgio Benvenuto, head of a Socialist Party that has been decimated by a national corruption scandal after decades in the corridors of political and industrial power.

Polls had predicted victory for the referendum questions, including issues taken directly to the people after a fractured Parliament of self-serving parties failed to agree on reform. With nowhere to hide, most major parties backed individual referendum questions. But hardly anybody anticipated the force of voter anger.

“This is an extraordinary day for Italian democracy,” said reform supporter Achille Occhetto, head of the former Italian Communist Party.

At least 70% of 48 million registered Italians went to the polls in the two-day vote. They buried the existing system of proportional representation by more than 80% and wrote finis to state funding of political parties by 90%, according to projections Monday night.

The Ministry for State Participation, which oversees operation of state-funded companies, and the Ministry of Tourism will be abolished with the support of more than four voters in five. The Ministry of Agriculture will also vanish, with support of around 70% of those voting.

Around nine voters in 10 insisted that the state should no longer name chief executives of banks and financial institutions in which it has an interest, and more than 80% agreed that enforcement of environmental standards should be taken away from do-little local health units.

The only one of the eight questions in which the winning margin was narrow was a proposal to decriminalize the personal use of drugs. That question also carried, around 55% to 45%, but it was the single referendum issue that reflected the left-right split that has been the hallmark of Italian political life since World War II.

Proposed by the small civil rights-oriented Radical Party and supported by the former Communists, Greens and other left-of-center parties, the referendum would allow judges to decide whether an individual was a user or a dealer. Dealers would go to jail, the users would not.

Under Italian law, referendums can be called only to abolish laws, not to propose them. That, then, leaves the key electoral reform in the hands of a Parliament split among 14 parties and movements that has proved unable so far to agree on how to change a proportional system that is blamed for postwar Italy’s procession of 51 weak coalitions.

As a result of the referendum, 238 of 315 seats in the Italian Senate will henceforth be filled in direct elections in which voters choose among individual candidates, one for each party. The candidate with the most votes wins, either in one round as is common in the United States or Britain, or in a runoff between the top two finishers.

The mechanics of the reform are to be established by Parliament. So too will be the manner of extending the reforms in the Senate to the 635-seat Chamber of Deputies, which was not addressed directly by the referendum.

The avalanche of voters for the reform, its supporters hope, should push Parliament to act quickly, certainly in time to allow national elections under the new rules next fall.

There is strong opposition, though, among parties of both the extreme left and right--unabashed Marxist and neo-fascist--who opposed the referendum reforms and fear they may be forced to legislate their own extinction. The leader of the Marxist Refounded Communists, a radical splinter party from the mainstream Communists, predicted a “political phase of bitter confrontation” in the referendum’s wake.

The 8 Issues

Here are the eight referendum issues approved by Italian voters Monday, and the percentage of the vote in favor of them, based on nearly complete vote counts:

* Abolition of the proportional election system for three-quarters of the Senate--81.6%.

* Immediate end to public financing of political parties--90%.

* Decriminalization of personal drug use--55.6%.

* Abolition of the Treasury minister’s right to nominate top executives for banks and other financial institutions in which the state has an interest--89.9%.

* Removal of authority for monitoring environmental laws from inefficient local health units--82.2%.

* Abolition of the Agriculture Ministry, its duties to be assumed by regional governments--69.2%.

* Abolition of the Tourism Ministry--80.6%.

* Abolition of the Ministry for State Participation, which oversees operation of state-funded companies--89.9%.