Nazareno Pact

The Nazareno Pact (Italian: patto del Nazareno) was a political agreement signed between the Democratic Party (PD) secretary Matteo Renzi (who became Prime Minister of Italy on 22 February 2014) and the Forza Italia (FI) president Silvio Berlusconi on 18 January 2014 with the objectives of implementing a series of reforms, including the reform of Title V of Part II of the Italian constitution, the transformation of the Senate of the Republic into the Chamber of Autonomies, and the approval of a new electoral law. The agreement was contested by the Five Star Movement (M5S), which was the main opposition group, and was also criticised by dissidents within both the PD and FI.

The electoral law was based on the two-round system used for local and regional governments, and envisioned a proportional representation system, with a strong majority bonus awarded through a runoff between the two most popular electoral coalitions or electoral lists if neither would reach a certain electoral threshold in the first round. The mechanism was inspired by the direct election of mayors and was adopted to ensure a certain winner. It was also similar to the Spanish model as a proportional system based on small constituencies, which naturally tend to favour two-party politics, with the addition of a majority bonus to ensure government stability. Finally, it was based on a revision of Mattarellum, the majoritarian system adopted by Italy from 1993 to 2001, with correctives that included a majority bonus instead of the proportional recovery to still ensure a clear majority government for the winner.

As a journalistic and political term, the name derived by metonymy from the toponym of Largo del Nazareno in Rome, near the PD headquarters, where Renzi and Berlusconi held their first declared meeting. The agreement expired in February 2015 following the election of Sergio Mattarella as president of Italy. Various commentators speculated about the further contents of the agreement. Ultimately, most of the more significant proposed reforms did not come to pass, as the constitutional reform was rejected in the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum and the electoral law, which had to be revised and saw a long process, was ruled unconstitutional and a different law (Rosatellum, which is still the electoral law as of 2026) was adopted. As a result of the failure of his reform proposals, Renzi resigned as Prime Minister.