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All 508 seats in the Chamber of Deputies 255 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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General elections were held in Italy on 23 November 1890, with a second round of voting on 30 November. [1] The "ministerial" left-wing bloc emerged as the largest in Parliament, winning 401 of the 508 seats. [2] [3] As in 1886, the elections were held using small multi-member constituencies with between two and five seats. [4]
Francesco Crispi was appointed prime minister on 29 July 1887. True to his initial progressive leanings he moved ahead with stalled reforms, abolishing the death penalty, revoking anti-strike laws, limiting police powers, reforming the penal code and the administration of justice with the help of his Minister of Justice Giuseppe Zanardelli, reorganising charities and passing public health laws and legislation to protect emigrants that worked abroad. He sought popular support for the state with a programme of orderly development at home and expansion abroad. [5] [6]
His desire to make Italy a colonial power led to conflicts with France, which rejected Italian claims to Tunisia and opposed Italian expansion elsewhere in Africa. [5] One of his first acts as premier was a visit to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, whom he desired to consult upon the working of the Triple Alliance. Basing his foreign policy upon the alliance, as supplemented by the naval entente with Great Britain negotiated by his predecessor, Robilant, Crispi assumed a resolute attitude towards France, breaking off the prolonged and unfruitful negotiations for a new Franco-Italian commercial treaty, and refusing the French invitation to organize an Italian section at the Paris Exhibition of 1889.
Crispi and his Treasury Minister Giovanni Giolitti knew of an 1889 government inspection report about the Banca Romana, which had loaned large sums to property developers but was left with huge liabilities when the real estate bubble collapsed in 1887, but feared that publicity might undermine public confidence and suppressed the report. [7] Forsaken by his Radical friends, Crispi governed with the help of the right until he was overthrown by Antonio Di Rudinì in February 1891, who was succeeded by Giovanni Giolitti in May 1892.
| Party | Ideology | Leader | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Historical Left | Liberalism | Francesco Crispi | |
| Historical Right | Conservatism | Antonio Starabba di Rudinì | |
| Historical Far Left | Radicalism | Felice Cavallotti | |
 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Votes | % | Seats | +/– | |
| Historical Left | 401 | +109 | |||
| Historical Right | 48 | −97 | |||
| Historical Far Left | 42 | −3 | |||
| Others | 17 | New | |||
| Total | 508 | 0 | |||
| Valid votes | 1,452,797 | 98.35 | |||
| Invalid/blank votes | 24,376 | 1.65 | |||
| Total votes | 1,477,173 | 100.00 | |||
| Registered voters/turnout | 2,752,658 | 53.66 | |||
| Source: Nohlen & Stöver | |||||
Giovanni Giolitti was an Italian statesman. He was the prime minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. He is the longest-serving democratically elected prime minister in Italian history, and the second-longest serving overall after Benito Mussolini. A prominent leader of the Historical Left and the Liberal Union, he is widely considered one of the most wealthy, powerful and important politicians in Italian history; due to his dominant position in Italian politics, Giolitti was accused by critics of being an authoritarian leader and a parliamentary dictator.
Giuseppe Zanardelli was an Italian jurist and political figure. He served as the Prime Minister of Italy from 15 February 1901 to 3 November 1903. An eloquent orator, he was also a Grand Master freemason. Zanardelli, representing the bourgeoisie from Lombardy, personified the classical 19th-century liberalism, committed to suffrage expansion, anticlericalism, civil liberties, free trade and laissez-faire economics. Throughout his long political career, he was among the most ardent advocates of freedom of conscience and divorce.
Francesco Crispi was an Italian patriot and statesman. He was among the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, a close friend and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and one of the architects of Italian unification in 1860. Crispi served as Prime Minister of Italy for six years, from 1887 to 1891, and again from 1893 to 1896, and was the first prime minister from Southern Italy. Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck, William Ewart Gladstone, and Lord Salisbury.
Luigi Luzzatti was an Italian financier, political economist, social philosopher, and jurist. He served as the 20th prime minister of Italy between 1910 and 1911.
Antonio Starrabba, Marquess of Rudinì was an Italian statesman, Prime Minister of Italy between 1891 and 1892 and from 1896 until 1898.
Agostino Depretis was an Italian statesman and politician. He served as Prime Minister of Italy for several stretches between 1876 and 1887, and was leader of the Historical Left parliamentary group for more than a decade. He is the fourth-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history, after Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Giolitti and Silvio Berlusconi, and at the time of his death he was the longest-served. Depretis is widely considered one of the most powerful and important politicians in Italian history.
The Fasci Siciliani, short for Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori, were a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration that arose in Sicily in the years between 1889 and 1894. The Fasci gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channeling their frustration and discontent into a coherent programme based on the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a jumble of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and socialist consciousness, the movement reached its apex in the summer of 1893, when new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of sharecropping and rental contracts.
Napoleone Colajanni was an Italian writer, journalist, criminologist, socialist, and politician. In the 1880s, he abandoned republicanism for socialism, and became Italy's leading theoretical writer on the issue for a time. He has been called the father of Sicilian socialism. Due to the Italian Socialist Party's discourse of Marxist class struggle, he reverted in 1894 to his original republicanism and joined the Italian Republican Party. Colajanni was an ardent critic of the Lombrosian school in criminology. In 1890, he was elected in the national Chamber of Deputies and was re-elected in all subsequent parliaments until his death in September 1921.
The Banca Romana scandal surfaced in January 1893 in Italy over the bankruptcy of the Banca Romana, one of the six national banks authorised at the time to issue currency. The scandal was the first of many Italian corruption scandals, and discredited both ministers and parliamentarians, in particular those of the Historical Left and was comparable to the Panama Canal Scandal that was shaking France at the time, threatening the constitutional order. The crisis prompted a new banking law, tarnished the prestige of the Prime Ministers Francesco Crispi and Giovanni Giolitti and prompted the collapse of the latter's government in November 1893. The scandal led also to the creation of one central bank, the Bank of Italy.
General elections were held in Italy on 6 November 1892, with a second round of voting on 13 November. The "ministerial" left-wing bloc emerged as the largest in Parliament, winning 323 of the 508 seats. The electoral system reverted to the pre-1882 method of using single-member constituencies with second round run-offs.
General elections were held in Italy on 26 May 1895, with a second round of voting on 2 June. The "ministerial" left-wing bloc remained the largest in Parliament, winning 334 of the 508 seats.
General elections were held in Italy on 7 March 1909, with a second round of voting on 14 March. The "ministerial" left-wing bloc remained the largest in Parliament, winning 329 of the 508 seats.
Events from the year 1893 in Italy.
Events from the year 1892 in Italy.
Events from the year 1894 in Italy.
The Left group, later called Historical Left by historians to distinguish it from the left-wing groups of the 20th century, was a liberal and reformist parliamentary group in Italy during the second half of the 19th century. The members of the Left were also known as Democrats or Ministerials. The Left was the dominant political group in the Kingdom of Italy from the 1870s until its dissolution in the early 1910s.
The Liberal Union, simply and collectively called Liberals, was a political alliance formed in the first years of the 20th century by the Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Historical Left Giovanni Giolitti. The alliance was formed when the Left and the Right merged in a single centrist and liberal coalition which largely dominated the Italian Parliament.
Events from the year 1890 in Italy.
Events from the year 1889 in Italy
Events from the year 1887 in Italy
