The Senate reintroduces preferential votes with blocked list leaders

Two days of voting in the Senate chamber have redrawn two points of the electoral reform: how elected officials are chosen and the conditions for entering the competition.

On September 10, 2026, the chamber approved the majority’s amendment, first signed by Fratelli d’Italia senator Marco Lisei, which reintroduces preferential votes while keeping list leaders blocked: 97 votes in favor, 67 against, two abstentions. This is reported by Il Post, La Voce d’Italia and Panorama, all based on the chamber’s official record.

The mechanism approved has a precise effect: the first name on each list remains chosen by the party, while the others are decided by the voter’s ballot. This is the difference that the Partito Democratico had tried to eliminate with a sub-amendment proposing preferential votes without blocked list leaders and two possible choices. It was rejected with 99 votes against and 68 in favor.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni claimed the result as a success: “Preferential votes had been missing for almost 35 years.”

The second vote: bonus without threshold, signatures quadrupled

On September 11, the chamber approved, with 87 votes in favor, a reformulated amendment first signed by Fratelli d’Italia senator Antonella Zedda. On this development, the news currently comes from a single source, the ANSA agency, based on the Senate chamber’s official record; no independent confirmation is available.

The amendment does two distinct things. The first: it eliminates any threshold for a list’s votes to count toward the calculation of the majority bonus. The second concerns those wishing to enter: the minimum number of signatures required for political groups not represented in Parliament rises from 1,500 to 6,000, with a maximum cap of 7,000.

The exemptions outline an equally informative landscape: those with two groups in Parliament, and those with at least one group formed by December 31, 2025, remain exempt from the requirement. For those with a component in only one chamber of Parliament, the signatures required remain between 1,500 and 2,000.

Subject	Signatures required
New non-parliamentary groups	from 6,000 to 7,000
Those with a component in one chamber	from 1,500 to 2,000
Two groups in Parliament, or one group by 12/31/2025	exempt

The two rules work in opposite directions for smaller parties: on one hand, their votes still count toward the bonus even without reaching a threshold; on the other, entering the competition becomes more costly if they are not already represented in Parliament.

The timeline

The text as amended will return to the Chamber of Deputies on September 28, where a secret ballot vote will again be possible. The final vote is expected by mid-October. The Chamber had already approved the reform in July 2026, by secret ballot, with 217 in favor, 152 against and 2 abstentions: a margin that, at Montecitorio, without an obligation for an open vote, is the figure to bear in mind for the final reading.

What we don’t know

Today’s dossier does not contain the full text of the approved amendments, so we cannot describe the literal wording of the rules on preferential votes and the threshold. It does not contain the percentage of the majority bonus in the version that emerged from the Senate, nor the number of preferences that can be expressed under the Lisei amendment. It does not contain the positions of individual opposition groups beyond the Partito Democratico’s sub-amendment, nor statements of vote from the majority’s components on the Zedda amendment.

Two questions therefore remain open, which only the third reading can settle: whether the Chamber will confirm the framework that emerged from the Senate, and whether the secret ballot will produce the same result as the open vote. The first date to mark is September 28.