From day one, it was clear what the logic behind every action of this government was: power for power. In this first year, in fact, we have had a taste of the ravenous aggression of every institutional, political, cultural and media space with the amazing goal of reaffirming the hegemonic supremacy of the right. A right that does not tolerate obstacles or background noise, so much so that, without paying for the numbers, Meloni has so far collected the beauty of 43 decree-laws and 21 matters of trust. The result is a debased Parliament, relegated to a body that ratifies decisions already taken, despite the appeals of the President of the Republic. No government had ever done worse than the Premier, even going so far as to warn Parliament from presenting amendments to the budget law.
Could this almost undisturbed operating mode be enough to satisfy the appetites of a bulimic right for power and control? The answer is in the constitutional reform project presented last week, it goes without saying, by the government. A model that is not new, but borrowed from the Berlusconi experience, when the wise men of Lorenzago, founding fathers, led by the evergreen Calderoli, gave birth to the unfortunate reform of 2003 which was soundly rejected by the voters and also by the constitutional doctrine of those times, when the illustrious Giovanni Sartori he went so far as to define the system deriving from the premiership as “an unconstitutional constitution”.
The reason is easy to say: the premiership, whose very definition indicates a parliamentary system in which the executive power dominates the legislative power, is revealed a legal mess. A reform that radically changes our form of parliamentary government, weakens the President of the Republic, constitutionalizes reversals and factionalism within the government and has no equal in the entire panorama of comparative constitutional law. A mess which essentially disregards the same declared objectives, i.e. having a prime minister elected directly by the people, a system that avoids reversals and guarantees a more stable government.
If it is true that the prime minister would be elected directly by the people, it is not equally true that the citizens have the guarantee of not seeing the election result and that the government retains its stability, because the same bill allows the elected Prime Minister can be replaced by another parliamentarian of the same majority. In short, the voters who voted for Meloni Premier could find themselves with a government led by Salvini, Tajani or Gasparri, therefore an unelected prime minister, but with even greater powers than the elected prime minister, because he is the only one with the effective power to dissolve the Rooms and therefore of a power of intimidation of Parliament who would find himself threatened with dissolution and new elections whenever he does not decide to accept the political direction expressed by the incoming Prime Minister. The result is a Parliament with a totally ornamental function, without real power of direction and controlcontinually in check, and a government that is anything but stable, under the constant threat of internal factionalism aimed at removing and ousting the elected prime minister.
An even more system without the necessary counterweightsbecause the reform project provides that the elected prime minister benefits from a 55% majority thanks to a constitutionalized but unconstitutional majority award as it has already been rejected by two sentences of the Constitutional Court. In this way, the Parliament in the image and likeness of the elected prime minister, which would also retain the right to appoint those elected due to the blocked lists that remain in force, could be self-sufficient, in the majority that supports the government, for the election of the President of the Republic and the judges of the Constitutional Court.
We will therefore have an elected but not strong prime minister, a President of the Republic relegated to master of ceremonies in a diarchic relationship that delegitimizes him because he always succumbs in the face of an organ directly derived from the popular will, dispossessed of the powers that justify his existence as potential “contropotere”. Liberal democratic constitutions, Sartori wrote, are structures that protect the freedoms of citizens by limiting, constraining and subjecting the exercise of political power to control. this is why political systems are designed in which each power is delimited by other powers, it is the principle of “power that limits power” and is valid for all variants of democracies. But not for the model outlined by His Majesty King Georgehungry for full power.
The program then is clearly to make a glut of power, wanting to take over the Presidency of the Republic and then the Constitutional Court to the point of besieging the autonomy of the judiciary through the separation of careers, subjecting the investigating judiciary to the control of the executive. And so on. If this program is successful, we will find ourselves in the presence of an all-powerful premiership system, of a sort of sorcerer who violates the essence of constitutionalism. “And so we would find ourselves living with an “unconstitutional constitution”, a nominal constitution which is reduced to being “the formalization of the effective localization of political power for the exclusive benefit of its effective holders”. Bad lending.
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