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1958 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

1958 Italian Senate election in Lombardy

← 1953 May 25, 1958 1963 →
All 33 Lombard seats to the Italian Senate
First party Second party Third party   Leader Amintore Fanfani Pietro Nenni Palmiro Togliatti Party DC PSI PCI Last election 46.7%, 16 seats 17.4%, 6 seats 18.2%, 6 seats Seats won 16 7 6 Seat change = 1 = Popular vote 1,805,779 747,266 746,880 Percentage 44.8% 18.5% 18.5% Swing 1.9% 1.1% 0.3%
Old local majority before election DC New local plurality DC

Lombardy elected its third delegation to the Italian Senate on May 25, 1958. This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1958 even if, according to the Italian Constitution, every senatorial challenge in each Region is a single and independent race.

Lombardy obtained two more seats to the Senate, following the redistricting subsequent to the 1951 Census.

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[edit]

Even if Amintore Fanfani's Christian Democracy weakened in this election, Lombardy remained a stronghold for the national leading party.

As it happened five years before, the Communists obtained some seats in the agricultural south, while the Socialists remarked their strength in the Milanese industrial neighbourhood. The centre-left Italian Democratic Socialist Party obtained two seats in Milan, a city led by Democratic Socialist mayor Virgilio Ferrari, while the rightist Italian Social Movement and the Italian Liberal Party obtained some good results in the bourgeois center of Milan.

Electoral system[edit]

The electoral system for the 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[edit]

Party	votes	votes (%)	seats	swing
Christian Democracy	1,805,779	44.8	16	=
Italian Socialist Party	747,266	18.5	7	1
Italian Communist Party	746,880	18.5	6	=
Italian Democratic Socialist Party	248,824	6.2	2	1
Italian Liberal Party	184,701	4.6	1	1
Italian Social Movement	151,330	3.8	1	=
Others & PNM	147,523	3.6	-	1
Total parties	4,032,303	100.0	33	2

Sources: Italian Ministry of the Interior

Constituencies[edit]

• 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[edit]

• Enesto Zanardi for Mantua (23.7%) replaced Teodosio Aimoni in 1959. Reason: resignation.
• Emanuele Samek Lodovici for Abbiategrasso (44.8%) replaced Pietro Bellora in 1959. Reason: death.
• Carlo Arnaudi for Abbiategrasso (20.7%) replaced Mario Grampa in 1961. Reason: death.
• Giuseppe Faravelli for Pavia (5.1%) replaced Edgardo Savio in 1961. Reason: death.
• Pasquale Valsecchi for Como (45.9%) replaced Lorenzo Spallino in 1962. Reason: death.

Notes[edit]