1972 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

May 7, 1972
All 45 Lombard seats to the Italian Senate
Majority party Minority party Third party   Leader Arnaldo Forlani Enrico Berlinguer Francesco De Martino Party DC PCI PSI Last election 42.2%, 20 seats 26.3%, 12 seats 13.3%, 6 seats as ¾ of the PSU Seats won 20 12 6 Seat change = = = Popular vote 2,072,472 1,219,259 644,694 Percentage 41.7% 24.5% 13.0% Swing 0.5% 1.8% 0.3%
Old local plurality before election DC New local plurality DC

Lombardy elected its sixth delegation to the Italian Senate on May 19, 1972. This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1972 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

This election was quite a copy of the previous one. The Italian Liberal Party was the sole loser, to its left to the Italian Republican Party and to its right to the Italian Social Movement.

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	2,072,474	41.7	20	=
Italian Communist Party & PSIUP	1,219,259	24.5	12	=
Italian Socialist Party	644,694	13.0	6	=
Italian Social Movement	303,850	6.1	2	1
Italian Liberal Party	279,887	5.6	2	2
Italian Democratic Socialist Party	265,518	5.3	2	=
Italian Republican Party	157,535	3.2	1	1
Others	27,876	0.6	-	=
Total parties	4,970,693	100.0	45	-

Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior

Notes