1968 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

May 19, 1968
All 45 Lombard seats to the Italian Senate
Majority party Minority party Third party   Leader Mariano Rumor Luigi Longo Francesco De Martino Party DC PCI Unified Socialist Last election 39.9%, 19 seats 20.7%, 10 seats 24.5%, 11 seats as PSI+PSDI Seats won 20 12 8 Seat change 1 2 3 Popular vote 1,984,072 1,238,087 836,918 Percentage 42.2% 26.3% 17.8% Swing 2.3% 5.6% 6.7%
Old local plurality before election DC New local plurality DC

Lombardy elected its fifth delegation to the Italian Senate on May 19, 1968. This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1968 even if, according to the Italian Constitution, every senatorial challenge in each Region is a single and independent race.

The election was won by the centrist Christian Democracy, as it happened at national level. Seven Lombard provinces gave a majority or at least a plurality to the winning party, while the agricultural Province of Pavia and Province of Mantua preferred the Italian Communist Party.

Background

Following the alliance between Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which entered into Aldo Moro's centre-left governments, the PSI created a federation with another member of the coalition, the Italian Democratic Socialist Party, but it paid its toll to the Italian Communist Party, which joined its forces with the newly established Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, the former Socialist leftist wing.

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

Party	votes	votes (%)	seats	swing
Christian Democracy	1,984,071	42.2	20	1
Italian Communist Party & PSIUP	1,238,087	26.3	12	2
PSI & PSDI	836,918	17.8	8	3
Italian Liberal Party	397,273	8.4	4	=
Italian Social Movement	177,956	3.8	1	=
Others	70,545	1.5	-	=
Total parties	4,704,850	100.0	45	-

Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior

Notes