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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 6 November 1892, with a second round of voting on 13 November. [1] The "ministerial" left-wing bloc emerged as the largest in Parliament, winning 323 of the 508 seats. [2] The electoral system reverted to the pre-1882 method of using single-member constituencies with second round run-offs. [3]
Giovanni Giolitti's first term as Prime Minister (1892–1893) was marked by misfortune and misgovernment. The building crisis and the commercial rupture with France had impaired the situation of the state banks, of which one, the Banca Romana, had been further undermined by misadministration. The Banca Romana had loaned large sums to property developers but was left with huge liabilities when the real estate bubble collapsed in 1887. [4] Then Prime Minister Francesco Crispi and his Treasury Minister Giolitti knew of the 1889 government inspection report, but feared that publicity might undermine public confidence and suppressed the report. [5]
The Bank Act of August 1893 liquidated the Banca Romana and reformed the whole system of note issue, restricting the privilege to the new Banca d'Italia – mandated to liquidate the Banca Romana – and to the Banco di Napoli and the Banco di Sicilia , and providing for stricter state control. [5] [6] The new law failed to effect an improvement. Moreover, he irritated public opinion by raising to senatorial rank the governor of the Banca Romana, Bernardo Tanlongo, whose irregular practices had become a byword, which would have given him immunity from prosecution. [7] The senate declined to admit Tanlongo, whom Giolitti, in consequence of an intervention in parliament upon the condition of the Banca Romana, was obliged to arrest and prosecute. During the prosecution Giolitti abused his position as premier to abstract documents bearing on the case.
Simultaneously a parliamentary commission of inquiry investigated the condition of the state banks. Its report, though acquitting Giolitti of personal dishonesty, proved disastrous to his political position, and the ensuing Banca Romana scandal obliged him to resign. [8] His fall left the finances of the state disorganized, the pensions fund depleted, diplomatic relations with France strained in consequence of the massacre of Italian workmen at Aigues-Mortes, and a state of revolt in the Lunigiana and by the Fasci Siciliani in Sicily, which he had proved impotent to suppress. Despite the heavy pressure from the King, the army and conservative circles in Rome, Giolitti neither treated strikes – which were not illegal – as a crime, nor dissolved the Fasci, nor authorised the use of firearms against popular demonstrations. [9] His policy was “to allow these economic struggles to resolve themselves through amelioration of the condition of the workers” and not to interfere in the process. [10]
| Party | Ideology | Leader | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Historical Left | Liberalism | Giovanni Giolitti | |
| Historical Right | Conservatism | Antonio Starabba di Rudinì | |
| Historical Far Left | Radicalism | Felice Cavallotti | |
 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Votes | % | Seats | +/– | |
| Historical Left | 323 | −78 | |||
| Historical Right | 93 | +45 | |||
| Historical Far Left | 56 | +14 | |||
| Others | 36 | +19 | |||
| Total | 508 | 0 | |||
| Valid votes | 1,655,397 | 97.76 | |||
| Invalid/blank votes | 37,901 | 2.24 | |||
| Total votes | 1,693,298 | 100.00 | |||
| Registered voters/turnout | 2,934,445 | 57.70 | |||
| 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 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.
Sidney Costantino, Baron Sonnino was an Italian statesman, 19th prime minister of Italy and twice served briefly as one, in 1906 and again from 1909 to 1910. He also was the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, representing Italy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
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.
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.
Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida was an Italian socialist politician and journalist from Sicily. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration. As the first socialist mayor of Catania in Sicily, from 1902 until 1914, he became the protagonist of a kind of municipal socialism.
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 23 November 1890, with a second round of voting on 30 November. The "ministerial" left-wing bloc emerged as the largest in Parliament, winning 401 of the 508 seats. As in 1886, the elections were held using small multi-member constituencies with between two and five seats.
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 21 March 1897, with a second round of voting on 28 March. The "Ministerial" left-wing bloc, led by Giovanni Giolitti remained the largest in Parliament, winning 327 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.
Events from the year 1895 in Italy.
Bernardino Grimaldi was an Italian politician. He was a Minister in several governments.
Events from the year 1889 in Italy
The Banca Romana was a bank of issue founded in Rome in 1834. In 1850 it was reorganized as the Bank of the Papal States, which in 1870 itself changed its name to Banca Romana. In the late 1880s, its difficulties developed into the major Banca Romana scandal which shook Italy's political life and triggered the creation in 1893 of the Bank of Italy. The Bank of Italy managed the Banca Romana's subsequent liquidation.
