Italy 1994!

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Yes, Palandio is correct. All will become clearer when the other maps are done...

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I never realised Milan was so conservative.

It isn't. But it voted massively massively Berlusconi in 1994 (his omnipresence in the city was a huge factor).

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Err, did you forget Apulia?

No. But Forza Italia did.

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Huh, I didn't remember AN was so strong in Puglia.

For some reason (does anyone know?) Forza Italia were not on the ballot there, which explains that...

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Trieste et al excepted, I presume the distribution in the North reflects migration from points south?

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oh this map is odd

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I mean, Tuscany, Liguria, the greater center, and big cities outside of it all make sense to me. Sardinia might have to do with Berlinguer (it'd be kind of fascinating if so). Not sure what's up in Calabria though.

Weaker around Bologna than in the parts of Lazio outside the City? Actually in the North the map makes 'sense'; it then immediately gets very weird very quickly.

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Talking of odd maps...

Anyway, the Segni Pact started off as a tendency of the DCs that supported scrapping proportional representation (because electoral reform is a magic bullet to all political problems as everyone knows) and soon became a political party. It changed its name a couple of times in responses to various mergers and splits and fought the 1994 election under the name of its leader, Mario Segni (son of former President and PM Antonio Segni). As well as DCs FOR REFORM it included a random assortment of people from other parties and none and was endorsed by former PSI PM Giuliano Amato. Rather bizarrely Segni ended up leading the electoral coalition for FPTP seats that included the PPI, but such was 1994. Rather amusingly he was defeated in his own FPTP constituency (Sassari) and was only returned as a Deputy on the PR list.

Oh yeah, note that they weren't on the ballot in large parts of the country.

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Why, yes, Marco Pannella was from Abruzzo, how could you tell?

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They were excluded by the checking commission because they collected the signatures needed under the law for presenting their Apulian list of candidates on irregular forms...more specifically, they presented some of those signatures on a National Alliance official form, cancelling NA logo and pen-writing "Forza Italia" in its place.

Fantastic! Thank you

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hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

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What exactly was the purpose of the Italian Socialists, aside from funnelling money to Craxi's accounts? Who voted for them? Were they a "genuine" party?

By 1994 the PSI had no purpose as everyone involved was in prison, on the run or about to go to prison. The party had an odd history: at Italy's first post-war election it was actually the largest Left party and had stronger support amongst industrial workers in the North than the PCI, but the Pietro Nenni's famous stupidity* and extraordinary strategic incompetence before the 1948 election put paid to that forever. The party broke its disastrous alliance with the PCI after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and then spent twenty years trying without much success to reconcile its hardline Marxist stance with a desire for political respectability and government participation. Under Craxi the party pretty much dropped all pretenses of bothering with a coherent political platform, running highly personalised campaigns based on vague populist platitudes and an appeal to a hazily defined vision of modernity - Craxi started the trend of political leaders often going without tie (while still wearing a suit) in order to appear more casual, incidentally - and enthusiastically chased middle class voters in the North while also building clientelist networks in the South. A lot of old-timers weren't too happy about all this, but Craxi's enthusiastic approach to corruption (all party members in a position of authority, from parliamentarians to local councillors, were encouraged to loot with systematic abandon to make sure that everyone got their cut: I guess you could say that this was the one form of socialism Craxi did not abandon) kept everyone happy until everyone was suddenly faced with criminal charges.

_{*A confidential British report from the mid 1940s described the PSI as a 'very silly' party and Nenni as its 'very silly' leader, contrasting this unfavourably the rather more serious PCI.}