Massimiliano Cencelli, DC functionary who gave Italy the 'Manuale Cencelli' for dividing political power, dies at 90

Death of a DC functionary

Massimiliano Cencelli, a former functionary of the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) whose surname became synonymous with the proportional distribution of political power in Italy, died in Rome on Saturday afternoon, 8 August 2026, at the age of 90. Born in Rome in 1936, Cencelli joined the DC as a teenager, entering the party's organization and rising to become secretary to Adolfo Sarti, a prominent Christian Democrat and multiple-time minister. He later collaborated with Nicola Mancino, who went on to serve as vice-president of the Superior Council of the Magistracy. Though he never held high office himself, Cencelli's name entered the Italian political vocabulary and remains cited in university textbooks decades later.

Origins of the Manual

The "Manuale Cencelli" was never a published document in its original form. It was a method that Cencelli described in a 2003 interview with the newspaper Avvenire. In 1967, at the DC congress in Milan, Adolfo Sarti, together with Cossiga and Taviani, founded the "pontieri" faction, so called because it was meant to bridge the majority and the left. The faction secured 12% of the vote, and Cencelli proposed applying corporate logic to politics.

If we have 12%, just as in a company's board of directors positions are divided according to shares held, the same should happen for party and government positions according to memberships. Sarti told me to work on it.

Under this scheme, Taviani kept the Interior ministry, Gaspari became undersecretary for Posts, Cossiga got Defense, and Sarti took Tourism and Entertainment. The method became public knowledge because during government crises, Sarti would jokingly tell journalists seeking previews to "ask Cencelli."

The method and its legacy

The manual assigned a "power score" to each position, minister, undersecretary, or committee chair, allowing governments to be formed with a distribution of roles that matched the weight of allied parties and their internal factions. Not all positions carried equal value: a portfolio ministry outweighed one without, an undersecretary counted less than a minister. During the First Republic, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was reportedly the most valuable portfolio, because it could hire up to 150,000 postal workers, making it a prize for consensus-builders like Remo Gaspari and Antonio Gava. The manual was published in two editions, by Editori Riuniti in 1981 and by Aliberti in 2016, with text by journalist Renato Venditti.

Giulio Andreotti dismissed it in the mid-1970s as "a book to forget," while socialist Giuliano Amato later offered a different verdict.

One must do what liberal thinkers like Rawls and intelligent practitioners like Cencelli taught us.

Reactions and modern relevance

Gianfranco Rotondi, a former DC leader now serving as a deputy for Fratelli d'Italia, commented on Cencelli's passing.

More than the party leader, Cencelli has always remained in the news, never left it and never will. His masterpiece was a manual as celebrated as it was paradoxically never published: the Manuale Cencelli.

Rotondi added that the manual associated every position of power with a "power score," enabling the formation of governments with a correct distribution of positions among allied parties and their internal factions. He noted that the practice of "lottizzazione" still exists, and that Cencelli made it scientific. La Stampa applied an algorithm based on Cencelli's logic to the current Meloni government, analyzing 65 executive positions. According to the analysis, Forza Italia holds 18% of the center-right's seats from the 2022 elections but controls 25% of government power, making it overrepresented by 7 points. Fratelli d'Italia, with 59.4% of the vote, controls less than half of government power, while Lega and Forza Italia together, with less than 39% of the vote, share 51% of the power.