1953 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

1953 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

← 1948 June 7, 1953 1958 →
All 31 Lombard seats to the Italian Senate
First party Second party Third party   Leader Alcide De Gasperi Palmiro Togliatti Pietro Nenni Party Christian Democracy Communist Party Socialist Party Last election 53.8%, 18 seats 16.9%, 5 seats as ½ of the FDP 16.9%, 5 seats as ½ the FDP Seats won 16 6 6 Seat change 2 1 1 Popular vote 1,739,691 678,804 648,787 Percentage 46.7% 18.2% 17.4% Swing 7.1% 1.3% 0,5%
Old local majority before election DC New local majority DC

Lombardy elected its second delegation to the Italian Senate on June 7, 1953. This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1953 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. All Lombard provinces gave a majority or at least a plurality to the winning party.

Background[]

Alcide De Gasperi's Christian Democracy weakened in this election, after that the exceptional conditions of 1948 had expired. However, Lombardy remained a stronghold for the national leading party.

Communists and Socialists obtained more votes running divided than they did together five years before, absorbing most of the Republican electorate. Even if the Communists obtained some seats in the agricultural south, the Socialists remarked their strength in the Milanese industrial neighbourhood. The Italian Democratic Socialist Party obtained a seat in Milan, a city led by its mayor Virgilio Ferrari, while the rightist and anti-constitutional Italian Social Movement and the Monarchist National Party took away some Conservative votes from the Christian Democracy and obtained their first seats in the bourgeois centers of Milan and Como.

Electoral system[]

The electoral system introduced in 1948 for the newly elected 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	1,739,691	46.7	16	2
Italian Communist Party	678,804	18.2	6	1
Italian Socialist Party	648,787	17.4	6	1
Italian Democratic Socialist Party	215,196	5.8	1	=
Italian Social Movement	140,327	3.8	1	1
Monarchist National Party	124,905	3.6	1	1
Others	175,418	4.7	-	2
Total parties	3,723,128	100.0	31	=

Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior

Constituencies[]

• Senators with a direct mandate have bold percentages. Please remember that the electoral system was, in the other cases, a form of proportional representation and not a FPTP race: so candidates winning with a simple plurality could have (and usually had) a candidate (always a Christian democrat) with more votes in their constituency.

Substitutions[]

• for Busto Arsizio (19.1%) replaced Rodolfo Morandi in 1955. Reason: death.
• for Abbiategrasso (46.0%) replaced Ezio Vanoni in 1956. Reason: death.
• Giuseppe Terragni for Como (46.1%) replaced in 1957. Reason: resignation.
• for Mantua (21.2%) replaced Antonio Banfi in 1957. Reason: death.
• for Voghera (6.6%) replaced Attilio Terragni in 1958. Reason: death.

Notes[]