Rule Prohibiting Electoral Agreements

The Rule Prohibiting Electoral Agreements bars cardinal-electors from entering into a pact, agreement, promise, or commitment concerning the election, with excommunication as the stated penalty. Its significance lies in the gap between the rule’s prohibition and the conclave’s political reality: electors must choose among candidates through repeated ballots, while private coordination can determine which candidate becomes viable. The rule therefore frames a conflict between procedural restraint and strategic coalition-building rather than preventing political calculation outright.

The Rule and the Election’s Arithmetic

The prohibition is invoked as the first ballot gives way to negotiation. In theory, electors cannot make binding electoral arrangements; in practice, the question of who can reach the required seventy-nine votes presses them to assess one another’s support. At a dinner after the first ballot, the Italian cardinals supporting Aldo Bellini consider the results and the prospects of the leading candidates. The election has become a matter of arithmetic, even as its formal rules forbid commitments intended to shape it.

That arithmetic is not abstract. In the first ballot, thirty-four cardinals receive at least one vote, and no candidate approaches the seventy-nine-vote threshold. Bellini’s support stalls near the end of the count, while Joshua Adeyemi finishes ahead of him. Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli’s five votes trouble him because he suspects they may have been drawn from Bellini, weakening the candidate he hoped to support. The spread of votes makes coordination more tempting: without it, the field remains fragmented; with it, electors risk crossing the line the rule establishes.

Conscience and Coalition-Building

The tension becomes explicit when Lomeli, Bellini, and Bellini’s campaign manager, Giulio Sabbadin, consider backing Joseph Tremblay. Sabbadin calculates that Bellini’s fifteen votes and Lomeli’s twelve, added to Tremblay’s forty, would bring Tremblay to sixty-seven, leaving him twelve short of the required majority. He argues that consolidating support is the conclave’s purpose once a candidate’s personal favorite is no longer viable. Bellini accepts that Tremblay has broad appeal, though neither man is enthusiastic about him.

Lomeli objects not only to the candidate but to the method. He worries that the three men are meeting in collusion to influence the result and compares the arrangement to a smoke-filled political convention. For him, the electors’ oath requires each to vote for the candidate he believes before God should be elected, not merely for the least objectionable choice. Bellini and Sabbadin, by contrast, treat shifting support as a practical necessity of the process. Their disagreement exposes the rule’s unsettled boundary: it prohibits electoral commitments, but the characters differ over whether discussion, persuasion, and coordinated recommendations amount to a prohibited pact.

The Rule in Practice

The proposed arrangement moves from discussion toward action when Bellini asks Lomeli to speak to his supporters while Bellini does the same, urging them to support Tremblay. Lomeli agrees hesitantly and notes that he barely knows who his supporters are beyond Bellini and Vincent Benítez. Sabbadin then identifies Benítez’s four votes as potentially decisive and suggests that Lomeli try to persuade him. The scene shows how influence can be organized without a formal written agreement: personal appeals and coordinated messages can serve the same strategic aim, while leaving the precise violation difficult to define.

The novel does not present the prohibition as a rule that eliminates bargaining. Rather, it makes bargaining morally and institutionally contentious. Sabbadin invokes the need to choose among a narrowing field; Lomeli answers with the obligation of conscience and the danger of treating a sacred election as ordinary political negotiation. The rule’s force in the story comes from this unresolved tension between the integrity of each elector’s ballot and the collective effort to produce a winner.