Dear Pirates,
I have an update related to the European Elections, but first it’s probably better to do a quick recap of the Italian situation regarding elections.
Parties that want to participate to an election in Italy have to fulfil certain requirements, in particular:
- a party or coalition of parties has to register its symbol prior to the election (for every election where it wants to participate)
- for every electoral district where the party wants to present a list of candidates, the party or coalition has to collect a certain number of signatures that depends on the election type, unless the party is exempted according to the law.
According to the previous law concerning European elections, any party that had elected MEPs or was connected to a party already present in the European Parliament was exempted from the signature collection requirement. Since we are part of PPEU and had Mikuláš’ permission to use the name and symbol of the European Pirate Party, we would have been exempted from this collection if the law had been the same.
However, on March 28th, 2024 the law was changed by the Italian Parliament, while converting into law a government decree regarding some procedural issues of the law. According to the changed law, only parties that had elected MEPs in the Italian electoral districts and parties which carried the symbol of an european party that forms a parliamentary group were exempted.
This change left the excluded parties that were previously exempted with one month to collect a huge amount of signatures, whereas parties that already knew that they were not exempted had six months to collect the signatures. The government claimed that the “signature discount” (around 50%) they provided was sufficient to compensate for this late change, which of course was ridiculous.
We were able to register the symbol for the election and went forward with presenting the lists in two district: Central Italy (Rome) and North-Western Italy (Milan). Within 24h we were notified of the rejection in both districts and appealed to the Supreme Court of Cassation, claiming a violation of the rule of the law since the law change was too close to the elections. The Court recognised our affiliation with PPEU, but basically argued that Mikuláš is not the chair of a parliamentary group and claimed that - in this type of procedure - it is not competent to escalate the case to the Constitutional Court.
After considering all the routes available, we held an assembly and decided to file a case with the European Court of Human Rights, and today I filed the application.
Let’s see what will happen from here.
–
Marco Confalonieri
Legal representative
Pirati