▲ A view of the House of Representatives in Rome, the capital of Italy. [EPA=Yonhap News]
Several European countries, headed by Italy, ahead of a referendum, are making political reforms to reduce the number of parliamentarians.
There is a common point of fixing the high cost and low efficiency congress system.
In Italy, a referendum to reduce the number of members of the National Assembly is scheduled to be held on the 20th and 21st.
The referendum, originally scheduled to be held in March, was postponed to this month due to the spread of coronavirus.
The referendum agenda is about reducing the number of senators from 315 to 200 and the number of congressmen from 630 to 400.
Currently, the Italian coalition government is composed of the center-left Democratic Party and the dissident party Five-Sung Movement.
The Five Star Movement, an axis of the coalition, pledged in 2018 to "reform a low-efficiency and high-cost Congress that hinders national development."
The Five Sung Movement argues that if the number of lawmakers is reduced according to the initiative, it can save 500 million euros and about 700 billion won in blood tax based on the five-year term in Congress.
If this vote is passed, it will be applied from the 2023 general election.
Germany also recently agreed to amend a law to reduce the number of seats in the House of Representatives 709 in the long term, and France also passed a State Council meeting last year to reduce the number of seats in the House of Representatives by 25%.
Italy has 1.56 members of parliament per 100,000 citizens, more than Germany (0.80), France (1.48) and Spain (1.32), the major EU countries in the European Union.
The OECD average of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is 0.97, and it is estimated at 0.58 in Korea.
The number of Korean National Assembly members is 300.
It consists of 253 seats in the district and 47 seats for proportional representation.
Last year, in the course of discussing the revision of the election law with the main idea of the'quasi-linked proportional representation system' ahead of the general election, a proposal was also reviewed to "increase the number of members by 10% from the current 300 seats."
At the time, Justice Party CEO Sang-Jung Shim suggested, "Let's freeze the total amount of tax bills for lawmakers and increase the number of lawmakers."
At the time of the discussions on the revision of the election law, when a proposal to reduce the number of seats in districts came out, some members of the lawmakers protested.
However, due to the widespread disbelief in the political world, discussions on expanding the number of lawmakers ended in a matter of days.
It is true that not only Europe but also Korea is criticized for the'high cost-low efficiency' parliament.
Each member of the National Assembly receives a tax of about 150 million won per year as of 2019.
This is the sum of various allowances such as general allowances, holiday vacation expenses, legislative activity expenses, and special activity expenses.
Among OECD countries, it is said that only Japan and Italy are the top 10 countries in the world in terms of total tax revenues for Korean lawmakers, and more than Korea in terms of per capita national income.
This is'News Pick'.