The Acerbo law (law no. 2444 of 18 December 1923) , named after the then Undersecretary to the Prime Minister Giacomo Acerbo, was an electoral law of the Kingdom of Italy, and had the task of guaranteeing the country (Italy) , what today we would define a stable government, thus assigning a parliamentary majority to the first Italian party, by number of votes obtained in the elections.
The Acerbo Law , as well as all the laws of the kingdom of Italy, prior to the advent of fascism, a precise bureaucratic and parliamentary process follows, starting from the presentation of the Bill , which took place at the hands of Giacomo Acerbo, then undersecretary to the presidency of the council, to the council of ministers who approved it on June 4, 1923, subsequently, on June 9, it was taken over by the chamber and subjected to verification by a parliamentary commission, which was appointed by the President of the Chamber, at the time Enrico de Nicola, future president of the constituent assembly and subsequently provisional president of the republic.
The parliamentary commission that worked on the immature law
The parliamentary committee who worked on the implementation of the Acerbo Law, known as the commission of eighteen, was made up of eighteen parliamentarians, selected on the basis of the principle of representation of groups, this means that a certain number of parliamentarians were included in the commission for each group / party present in parliament , proportional to the total number of seats each party had and the party with the fewest seats in parliament got only one representative on the committee.
The commission was chaired by Giovanni Giolitti , representing the list of National Blocks (future National Fascist Party ), with which Giolitti had been elected to parliament, and at that time was the main governing party since the post of head of government had been assigned to Benito Mussolini who had taken control of the National Blocs.
Giovanni Giolitti had been a central figure in Italian politics in the past, holding the office of head of government for almost twenty years and his influence was such that that period would have taken the name of the "Giolitti era". If you want to learn more, I have dedicated a video to the Giolitti era.
Other prominent members of the immature commission were, the former prime ministers, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando , Antonio Salandra and Ivonne Bonomi , it should also be noted the presence in the committee of a relatively young Alcide de Gasperi , at the time forty, who, together with Enrico De Nicola, would have represented the face of the first republic, becoming in 1945 the first president of the republican council of Italy.
Once the approval of the chamber was obtained and passed to the vote of the Senate, the Acerbo "law" effectively became law on December 18, 1923. Law no. 2444 of November 18, 1923 it is universally known as the Acerbo Law and, as it is easy to guess, it takes its name from its original creator, the then undersecretary to the presidency of the council Giacomo Acerbo of the list of National Blocks.
What does the Acerbo law provide?
This law provided for the adoption of the plurinominal majority system within a single national college . Put simply, this means that with the immature law, the Italian parliament was elected on a national basis and the parliamentary seats were assigned in proportion to the total votes obtained by the various lists on a national scale.
Each list could have (at most) a number of candidates equal to two thirds of the total seats in the parliament, this is because initially the majority premium was fixed at 2/3 of the parliament and subsequently, during the commission's review operations, this number was reduced by 66% (two thirds of parliament) to 60%, but the number of parliamentarians who could be included in the lists remained unchanged. The remaining 40% of the parliament, according to this electoral law, was distributed, in a proportional manner, among all the remaining elected parties. However, this also means that, regardless of the actual electoral result, the distribution of parliamentary seats depended exclusively on the majority prize awarded to the winning list.
Said as simply as possible, the list that obtained more votes in the elections, and with more votes meant even one vote more than the second list, and had exceeded a margin of 25% of the total votes, would have been assigned, thanks to the aforementioned law, 60% of the total seats of the Italian Parliament, while the remaining 40% would have been distributed, proportionally among all the other lists and which we can identify with the main political parties of the time.
In this way, even in the extreme case in which all the minority forces had allied themselves, in an attempt to obstruct the work of the government, they would not have had enough votes available to prevent the government from working, since the government represented the first party and the latter, in any case, could count on 60% of the parliament.
It should be noted that, in the years immediately preceding the Acerbo Law, the party system of the kingdom of Italy was slightly different from what we are used to today, and at the same time it was profoundly different from the nineteenth-century party system in which individual parliamentarians were directly elected in parliament, on a local and regional basis, without going through lists or parties, and only later, once they were sworn in to the kingdom of Italy and took their seats in parliament, did they organize themselves into political groups. In short, in the early 1920s the ways in which parliament was constituted were a sort of middle ground between the old nineteenth-century system and the present one.
Conclusions
A few brief final considerations and in a certain sense personal, even if in different measures, all the parties present in parliament in 1923 contributed to the realization of this electoral law, in fact there was relatively little, very little, opposition and the law proposed by the National Blocs suffered very few changes during the various steps in commission. This means that if on the one hand it is absolutely true that this law definitively handed the country of Italy into the hands of Benito Mussolini and fascism, because the National Blocs were identified as the real creators of this law that would have given stability to the country, it should be emphasized and it should not be forgotten that the final responsibility, for the approval of the law, and its consequences, was of all the political forces that gave their approval to the implementation of an electoral law that de facto assigned 60% of the parliament to a single party , making the oppositions absolutely irrelevant.
Sources and books to learn more
Historical Portal of the Chamber of Deputies of the Republic - majority award system 1924 https://storia.camera.it/legislature/sistema-premio-maggioranza-1924
E.Gentile, Fascism. History and interpretation, https://amzn.to/2PjQZPR E.Gentile, The origins of fascist ideology (1918-1925) https://amzn.to/2DY4tPw
E.Gentile, Fascism in three chapters,
https://amzn.to/2zIVtKY
R. De Felice, The Interpretations of Fascism, https://amzn.to/2KRY4GQ
R. De Felice, Interview on Fascism, https://amzn.to/2QsYj0v
R. De Felice, Brief History of Fascism, https://amzn.to/2PiE15d
B. Mussolini, Doctrine of fascism, https://amzn.to/2PfL6U0
I apologize for the lack of "variety" of authors in this selection of books, but I preferred to focus on just two authors, these are Emilio Gentile and Renzo De Felice, probably two of the most authoritative, illustrious and famous interpreters of fascism, two authors who in their countless works dedicated to this topic, have been able to grasp every aspect, highlighting both the shining and the darker features.