The Italian general election of 1924

On 6 April 1924 Italians elected a new Chamber of Deputies. It was the first election since Benito Mussolini had become prime minister after the March on Rome, and the first held under a new electoral law known, after its author, as the Acerbo Law. The government’s National List, nicknamed the “big list” (listone), together with an auxiliary Fascist list, won about 65 per cent of the valid vote and 374 of the 535 seats. The opposition, divided and intimidated though it was, still gathered almost three million votes, and in the north of the country its combined total exceeded that of the government list. The campaign and the voting itself took place amid violence by Fascist squads, pressure from the administration and fraud, which a few weeks later the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti catalogued in parliament. It was the last multi-party election in Italy before 1946.

A prime minister without a majority

When at the end of October 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government, the National Fascist Party, founded only a year earlier, had just 35 deputies in the Chamber, and its Nationalist allies about ten. Mussolini’s first government was therefore a coalition: alongside the Fascists it included Liberals, Democrats, Popolari – the Catholics of the party founded by the priest Luigi Sturzo – and military men with no party affiliation. The Chamber elected in 1921 gave him its confidence and full powers over taxation and administration, but Mussolini knew that this majority was fragile. If the Liberals and the Popolari turned against him, the king could dismiss him just as he had appointed him.

Meanwhile the violence went on. The Fascist action squads (squadre) continued to attack the premises of Socialists, trade unions and Catholic co-operatives, and in January 1923 they were turned into a state body, the Voluntary Militia for National Security, paid from the budget and answerable directly to the prime minister. In August 1923 the priest Giovanni Minzoni was killed at Argenta, and further political murders followed across the country. Mussolini insisted that he wanted “normalisation”, yet in his very first speech as prime minister, on 16 November 1922, he reminded the deputies that he could have turned “this deaf and grey hall” into a bivouac for his squads – and let it be understood that he still could. This double game – legality towards the king and the elites, violence on the streets – was the essence of the Fascist road to power.

The Acerbo Law

The solution was to be a new electoral law. The bill was drafted by Baron Giacomo Acerbo, under-secretary in the prime minister’s office. It kept the proportional system of 1919 but added a majority bonus: the list that won the most votes nationally, provided it had at least 25 per cent, would automatically receive two-thirds of the seats, 356 out of 535. The remaining third would be shared out proportionally among the other lists. The Popolari tried to raise the threshold to 40 per cent, then to a third of the vote, and to reduce the bonus, but to no avail.

On 21 July 1923 the Chamber of Deputies passed the law by 223 votes to 123. Voting in favour were the Fascists, most of the Liberals – among them the former prime ministers Antonio Salandra and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando – and some of the Popolari, who broke party discipline. Against were the Socialists, the Communists, the liberal left and the Popolari loyal to Sturzo, whom the Vatican, under pressure from the government, had earlier induced to step down from the party leadership. Many deputies voted under the eyes of armed Fascists in the galleries and corridors. Some Liberals hoped that Mussolini, once he had a secure majority, would no longer need the squads and would rein them in himself. The Senate approved the law on 14 November and the king signed it on 18 November 1923. Historians call this vote the “suicide” of the liberal political class: the old masters of the state had themselves handed the Fascists the instrument with which to capture parliament.

At the end of January 1924 the king dissolved the Chamber and called elections for 6 April.

The big list

Mussolini made no alliances with other parties. He announced that he would take on to his list people ready for “active and disinterested collaboration”, but only as individuals, not as representatives of their parties. The National List, whose symbol was the lictor’s fasces, included alongside the Fascists numerous Liberals, among them Salandra and Orlando, Popolari expelled from their party, Democrats from the South and local notables who brought their own electoral following with them. The President of the Chamber, Enrico De Nicola, was also to stand, but withdrew before the election. Giovanni Giolitti, five times prime minister, did not join the list but ran his own, friendly to the government, in Piedmont. All this made it certain that Mussolini’s list would clear the 25 per cent threshold. In several constituencies the Fascists also fielded a second, auxiliary list made up of the party’s most radical members. Its purpose was to take from the opposition some of the seats in the third that was reserved for it.

The opposition went into the election split into many lists. The Socialists were divided into three parties: the maximalist Italian Socialist Party; the reformist Unitary Socialist Party (PSU), expelled from it in October 1922, whose secretary was Matteotti; and the Communists, who had broken away as early as 1921. The Communists proposed a joint “proletarian front”, but on terms the reformists would not accept. The Popolari, now led by Alcide De Gasperi, stood alone. The liberal opponents of Fascism, grouped around Giovanni Amendola, put up lists of the so-called constitutional opposition. Only men could vote. NCOs and private soldiers were deprived of the vote for the duration of the election.

A campaign of violence

The campaign was the most brutal in the history of united Italy. On 28 February 1924 in Reggio nell’Emilia, Fascists abducted the Socialist candidate Antonio Piccinini, a printer and trade unionist, from his home and murdered him. They dumped his body beside the tracks of the light railway that workers took into the city. Matteotti was driven away from a rally at Cefalù in Sicily, and Amendola was not allowed to speak in Naples. The squads broke up meetings, burned opposition newspapers, attacked printing works and tore down posters, and candidates and canvassers were beaten. The police and the prefects rarely intervened. The prefects, for their part, were instructed to combat abstention and steer votes towards the government list.

The new law introduced for the first time a uniform ballot paper bearing the symbols of the lists, on which the voter made a mark. In many constituencies, however, especially in the South, it was impossible to vote freely. Fascists stood in the polling stations, sometimes right by the booths, checking how people voted, and in some places votes were cast on behalf of others. In the North, where workers’ and Catholic organisations were stronger, the pressure was less effective.

The result

Turnout was about 64 per cent. The National List received 4,305,936 votes, or 60.1 per cent of the valid vote, and the auxiliary Fascist list another 347,552, or 4.8 per cent. Together this came to about 65 per cent. Since the big list had cleared the threshold by a wide margin, it received the whole bonus: 356 seats (after the death of one of those elected his seat passed to the Popolari, leaving 355 in the end), and the auxiliary list won a further 19 seats from the share reserved for the minority. A list of dissident Fascists opposed to Mussolini returned one deputy. The government camp thus had 374 seats, about 70 per cent of the Chamber. According to Italian historians’ tallies, around 275 of them were members of the Fascist Party itself – more than an absolute majority.

The opposition won about 161 seats. The Popolari took 9 per cent of the vote and 39 seats, against 108 in the previous Chamber; Matteotti’s Unitary Socialists just under 6 per cent and 24 seats; the Maximalists 5 per cent and 22 seats; the Communists 3.7 per cent and 19 seats; and various Liberal, Democratic and Republican lists from a few to a dozen or so seats each. Despite the violence, the opposition’s showing was considerable. In the northern constituencies its lists together polled more votes than the government list. Mussolini’s advantage came from the South and the islands, where local notables and prefects “made” the elections and violence and fraud were at their worst.

The government list thus gave the Fascists the two-thirds majority that is usually mentioned in accounts of this election. This needs to be qualified, however. The listone obtained two-thirds of the seats by virtue of the Acerbo Law. In votes, all the government lists together won about 65 per cent, slightly less than two-thirds, and the big list alone 60 per cent. Paradoxically, with a result like this the bonus proved unnecessary: under proportional representation Mussolini’s list would have had a clear majority anyway. The Acerbo Law had done its work earlier, during the campaign. It was the law that encouraged Liberals and notables to climb aboard a train that was sure to win, and that persuaded voters that a vote for the opposition was wasted.

Matteotti’s protest

The new Chamber met at the end of May 1924. On 30 May, when the election of deputies was being validated, Matteotti moved that the mandates of the government list should not be confirmed en bloc and that the matter be referred to the elections committee. In a speech lasting several hours, interrupted by the shouts and insults of Fascist deputies, he listed cases of violence, intimidation and fraud constituency by constituency and argued that no voter had been able to vote freely and that the result was invalid. His motion was rejected by 285 votes to 57, with 42 abstentions. According to his colleagues, when he had finished, Matteotti said to the deputy sitting next to him: “I have made my speech. Now you can prepare the speech for my funeral.” On 10 June he was abducted in Rome by a Fascist squad and murdered.

Significance

The election of 6 April 1924 was not yet an election in a one-party state. More than a dozen lists stood, the opposition had its deputies and its newspapers, and its votes were counted. But it showed how Fascism transformed parliamentary democracy from within: the electoral law was changed with the consent of the old elites, opponents were intimidated, the machinery of the state was harnessed to the campaign, and the result gave this violence a veneer of legality. When a few weeks later the crime against Matteotti provoked the gravest crisis of his government, Mussolini could rely on the obedient majority elected in April. That majority went on to approve the laws of 1925–1926 that abolished the free press and the opposition parties, and in 1928 a new electoral law that turned elections into a plebiscite on a single list drawn up by the Grand Council of Fascism. The next elections, in 1929 and 1934, offered no choice at all.

With no parliament able to restrain him, Mussolini alone decided on war and peace. The same system that had given him his majority in 1924 allowed him to invade Ethiopia in 1935, to send troops to Spain in 1936 and draw closer to Hitler, and in May 1939 to conclude the Pact of Steel with Germany. Italy’s path from the March on Rome through the Acerbo Law to dictatorship was also an example to others. In Germany, Adolf Hitler, who was at that time in prison after his failed putsch, concluded that power had to be won legally, through elections, and only then could opponents be dealt with. Free elections returned to Italy only on 2 June 1946, together with the referendum in which Italians rejected the monarchy.