Just a week has passed since February 25th, the only day dedicated to voting for the renewal of the Regional Council in Sardinia. Campo Largo, with Alessandra Todde as president, currently appears victorious. According to what we could learn from the press, around 52% of those entitled to vote appear to have voted, therefore just over half. But beyond the results, which all things considered showed a minimal distance between the two contending coalitions, the analysis, necessarily after the vote, catalyzes the attention of commentators on the repercussions that the preference expressed by the Sardinian people could have on the national, on the Meloni Government itself given and considering that Paolo Truzzu, former mayor of Cagliari, was strongly supported by Giorgia Meloni himself, and on the results of the next electoral competitions of regional importance in other contexts.
Is the Sardinian vote a wake-up call, then, or a simple physiological change in the political color of the next council? How much has the decline in electoral participation in Sardinia affected, and does it affect, the outcomes? It is certainly no mystery to anyone that institutions, at whatever level we want to discuss, appear legitimized only when they are supported by the consensus of citizens expressed in the vote. Therefore, the results of the latest polls should be read and considered also and above all with specific reference to the real data of popular participation. In general, on a political level, to date the concrete commitment of the various party forces aimed at trying to limit, if not actually remove, any potential impediment, even if only of an ideological nature, which could fuel the phenomenon of abstention, i.e. the non-participation in electoral competitions of those who could, with their vote, concretely influence the democratic choices of the territory of reference. This latter circumstance would then seem, and even more so, to highlight the importance strictly limited to the borders of the regional perimeter of the latest votes for the renewal of the Council in Sardinia. Also because, with good likelihood, the dynamics of the expression of electoral preference could well be multiple and often traced back to the pure and simple personal liking of a presidential candidate rather than of his direct competitors.
Each regional context has its own specificities, and reporting the reflection of the results of those local votes on a national level appears not only fallacious in the method, but also inappropriate in the result. Even more so when, in the case of Sardinia, we want to consider the circumstance that, after all, the numerical gap between the two presidential candidates representing, respectively, the Campo Largo and the Centre-Right, Alessandra Todde and Paolo Truzzu, would appear to be minimal.
Saying it differently: first of all, it might appear illusory to attribute the results of the Sardinian polls to party logics and power relations that do not take into consideration the fundamental question of the so-called real consensus; secondly, it could prove irrelevant to think in terms of the comparison with the percentages reported individually by each party, and by the reference coalition as a whole, in the just concluded votes and in the various previous electoral rounds, since each competition is supported from time to time by different circumstances; thirdly, there still seems to be a lack of due attention towards the study and detailed analysis, by the various party groups, of the phenomenon of abstention both at a territorial and national level. If nothing else, because participation in the vote, the foundation of legitimation within democratic systems, does not seem to need and/or be possible to be neglected if we really want to have a proactive impact on voters' approval.
Well, if on the one hand, it will probably not be the Sardinian polls that will affect the approval of the current Government majority, nor will it probably orient the vote, with good likelihood, in other Italian regions, on the other hand, the capacity shown by the Democratic Party and by the 5 Star Movement to stay united could, if the experience were replicated in the entire national context, prove decisive, and itself be a factor of change where the individual parties managed to overcome the differential nuances still existing on an ideological level.
Giuseppina Di Salvatore
(Lawyer – Nuoro)
