Italy Proposes to Take Itself Seriously : Resignation of disgraced prime minister ends in deafening cry for reform

Giuliano Amato, prime minister of Italy, resigned Thursday. The resignation of a prime minister in a nation that has had 51 changes of government since 1945 need be, in itself, no great shock to the national system. But this resignation comes as the formal culmination of a cataclysm in Italian political life. In a country where, proverbially, nothing ever changes, nothing may ever be quite the same.

By an extraordinary 82% margin, Italian voters have decided to replace the system of proportional representation by which their country has been governed since the defeat of Italian fascism at the end of World War II with a winner-take-all system more like that used in the rest of Western Europe and in the United States. Because Italian referendums, unlike those we know in California, cannot make law, the Italian Parliament itself must now enact the legislation that will put many of its members out of work. How, in detail, it will do this is not yet known, but the practical effect of the change will unquestionably be the elimination of the smaller Italian political parties, parties that were able to gain a few seats in Parliament and then engage in a process of vote- and favor-trading that was easily prey to corruption.

The vote was essentially a vote against that corruption, laid bare after an investigation that has gone on for months and has ruined five members of Prime Minister Amato’s Cabinet. Italians have been asking, as one highly placed figure after another has been exposed, “Where will it end?” In a sense, it has ended with this deafening cry for reform.

And yet the very vastness of the corruption that has been exposed means that opposition to reform, notwithstanding the vote, will also be vast. The old system, given virtue in those who operated it, might have remained functional. A new system, given the will to corrupt it, will not be incorruptible. In such matters, there is no definitive technical fix. Ending proportional representation--the moral equivalent, in Italy, of the American term-limits movement--will not blot out original sin.

That said, the proposed technical fixes have much to recommend them. The winner-take-all system has worked well elsewhere. There is no intrinsic reason it should not work equally well in Italy. Even more commendable, however, is the Italians’ clear refusal to regard endless government corruption, not to speak of the brutal intrusion of organized crime into government, as simply Italy’s way of doing things: worldly, perhaps cynical, but realistic and ultimately functional. To bogus wisdom of that sort, the nation, to its credit, has now said “No!” in thunder and in so saying has entered upon, if not a revolution, then at least a political adventure of great moment.