Italian Senate election in Lombardy, 1953
Italian Senate election in Lombardy, 1953
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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. Even if the Communists obtained some seats in the agricultural south, the Socialists remarked their strength in the Milanese industrial neighbourhood. The centre-left PSDI obtained a seat in Milan, a city led by Social-democratic mayor Virgilio Ferrari, while the rightist and anti-constitutional MSI and PNM 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
| Parties |
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
Notes
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