DC
Lombardy elected its eleventh delegation to the Italian Senate on April 5, 1992.[1] This election was a part of national Italian general election of 1992 even if, according to the Italian Constitution, every senatorial challenge in each Region is a single and independent race.
The election was won by the centrist Christian Democracy, as it happened at national level. Seven Lombard provinces gave a majority or at least a plurality to the winning party, while the Swiss-bordering Province of Varese and Province of Como preferred the federalist Northern League.
After quite five decades of exceptional political stability, the election of 1992 marked a revolution. Umberto Bossi's Northern League, acting as a catch-all party, took votes from all other parties on a base of tax protest and a federalist project. Christian Democracy lost more than in the previous 30 years, the former Communists, now divided between the Democratic Party of the Left and the Communist Refoundation Party, more than ever, as well as all the other parties.
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.
Sources: Italian Ministry of the InteriorNote: PRC as a spinoff of PCI/PDS merged with DP.