1983 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

June 26, 1983
All 48 Lombard seats to the Italian Senate
Majority party Minority party Third party   Leader Ciriaco De Mita Enrico Berlinguer Bettino Craxi Party DC PCI PSI Last election 40.7%, 21 seats 29.4%, 15 seats 11.9%, 6 seats Seats won 17 15 6 Seat change 4 = = Popular vote 1,747,002 1,447,823 615,644 Percentage 34.4% 28.5% 12.1% Swing 6.3% 0.9% 0.2%
Old local plurality before election DC New local plurality DC

Lombardy elected its ninth delegation to the Italian Senate on June 26, 1983.^[1] This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1983 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. Six Lombard provinces gave a majority or at least a plurality to the winning party, while the agricultural Province of Pavia and Province of Mantua, and this time the industrial Province of Milan, preferred the Italian Communist Party.

Background

As the red rising seemed to be stopped in Italy, many center-right electors began to think no more necessary a vote for Christian Democracy which lost many seats to minor parties, especially to the Italian Republican Party of former Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini.

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	1,747,002	34.4	17	4
Italian Communist Party	1,447,823	28.5	15	=
Italian Socialist Party	615,644	12.1	6	=
Italian Republican Party	349,351	6.9	3	2
Italian Social Movement	255,667	5.0	2	1
Italian Liberal Party	197,084	3.9	2	1
Italian Democratic Socialist Party	192,172	3.8	2	=
Radical Party	103,697	2.0	1	=
Others	168,885	3.3	-	=
Total parties	5,076,325	100.0	48	=

Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior

Notes