85 million amendments. When in 2015 Roberto Calderoli declared war on the Boschi bill he decided to go big. The Northern League senator relied on an algorithm that acted on minimal substitutions of terms and punctuation: if the changes had been examined one by one for one minute each, it would have taken 156 years. President Grasso – his goodness – declared them inadmissible as a whole, but the astonishment remained. The 100 amendments to the Green Pass decree law – which forced the Constitutional Affairs Commission to review the provision by postponing the Senate’s scrutiny – are nothing new. Least of all a record. Already last July the discussion on the Zan bill – the law against homotransphobia – had run aground due to interventions in the classroom and requests for changes: but even in that case the number of amendments – more than a thousand – paled in front of the League’s stunt . After all, to put it in the words of Tomasi di Lampedusa, “it is necessary that everything changes so that everything remains as it is”.
Throughout history, Italian deputies and senators have on several occasions expressed their satisfaction with the so-called filibustering: the term derives from an old Dutch word meaning “pirate”, and describes parliamentary filibuster. As old as the assemblies themselves, it is the means by which it is possible to obstruct the legislative process of unwelcome measures. The range of options is wide: it ranges from river interventions to the presentation of a large number of amendments and agendas, to the withdrawal of their parliamentarians to prevent the quorum being reached in the classroom. A completely lawful practice, regulations in hand: but which has sometimes been elevated from a technical tool to an authentic form of art.
The golden years of filibuster
In the beginning it was the socialists. Bissolati, Ferri, Vendramini, who in 1899 imported the filibustering against the “tyrannical measures” of Marshal Pelloux. But it was during the First Republic that obstruction became a virtue: in 1949 the Reds – this time the Communists – again declared battle against NATO membership. The chronicles of the time report how Togliatti’s men distinguished themselves as much for oratory as for “brute force”, animating a debate of “three days and three nights” that lasted between insults and scuffles. Other than amendments, it was precisely brought about: among the most active the honorable Pajetta, who flanked the sharp tongue with a right that does not seem to admit replies. «They flew benches and armchairs», remembered Andreotti, «to protect myself I put my head in a waste basket». The opposition to the electoral law of 1953, which evocatively went down in history as a “fraud law”, was milder: in that case the amendments were “only” 1,600. But the barricades were not the monopoly of the left. Even the Christian Democrats did not disdain the use of logorrhea: “We have delayed the approval of the laws on divorce and abortion by six months,” Andreotti was pleased.
The biggest problem apparently was the toilet. There was no room for physiological needs in the Italy of parliamentary extremism. Radical Franco Roccella knew this well, and before one of those exhausting nocturnal debates, he thought it best to secure himself with a catheter. Giorgio Almirante did not have these problems: the leader of the MSI, another party that in the First Republic had made obstruction its trademark, seemed impervious to fatigue. In 1970, already over sixty, he expressed his opposition to the approval of the law on the new regional system by holding the Montecitorio chamber hostage for over 10 hours. And without any help whatsoever, unlike Roccella: “Iron bladder”, he was nicknamed fellow deputies with half the age and double the trouble. He spoke with theatrical mimicry, without a lineup: great competence, extraordinary continence.
And veri master of the controversy, however, were the radicals. It was Pannella’s brigade that took the bar of obstruction and hoisted it into the sky, unattainable for anyone, net of Almirante and his associates from Missini. Between blocks, amendments and delays, their creativity was unrivaled. Imaginative, of course, but also trained: after all, before the new parliamentary regulations relegated him to a skirmish based on the continuous requests for verification of the quorum and references to the regulation repeated indefinitely, the filibustering it was serious. It took study, and it took the physicist. You could not read but it was a must to go off the cuff, since it was necessary to prepare in the library for months. We could not indulge in digressions, but always remain on the subject. And, last but not least, it was necessary to remain standing without leaning on the chair, addressing the president (and if in this regard Ingrao turned a blind eye, Nilde Iotti was inflexible).
In February 1981 the apotheosis: the renewal of the police arrest proposed by the Cossiga decree law was discussed, and Marco Boato was overcome. After only sixteen party comrades had managed to continue the discussion for over 95 hours, the radical sealed the enterprise with a heroic performance. He picked up the microphone at 8.10pm on February 10 and ended at 2.15pm the following day, talking non-stop for 18 hours and 5 minutes. Without eating, without drinking, without sitting down and without going to the bathroom. Unsurpassed and unsurpassed. A feat that, says Boato, “could have easily continued a couple of hours longer, but I was inundated with notes from colleagues from all the groups. We were at the beginning of February and there was fog, if I had gone ahead my colleagues would not have been able to leave for their homes by plane, so in the end I stopped, albeit reluctantly ». Boato’s exploits made even those of his hemicycle companion Teodori pale, who, preceding him at the microphone, had spoken for 34 hours in three days. Vice-president Luigi Preti, who found himself presiding over the Assembly in that historic session, even resorted to binoculars to check whether Boato used supports or tried to sit down: at one o’clock in the morning he repeatedly denied him to sip a cappuccino, strictly adhering to regulation that admits only sugared water.
The decline
Troubled by Boato’s exploits, Nilde Iotti ordered a turnaround: maximum 45 minutes per intervention. The presidents of the halls were also allowed to consider as a whole the very similar amendments. But the Communists did not lose heart. Berlinguer borrowed the sixteenth-century maxim by Giambattista Marino, according to which “the poet is the finest”: in 1984, to save time with respect to the approval of the Craxian decree on the escalator, he gave orders to his followers to applaud each of their actions until to peel their palms. And what interventions: Renato Nicolini, playwright for pleasure, read passages by Polish screenwriters of the 1920s, Edda Fagni quoted Trilussa. Times gone. Today we are saddened by requests for verification of the quorum. Between 1996 and 2001 the Northern League player Peruzzotti presented 4 thousand. Those were the times of the League of Celtic myths, the Po ampoule, Bossi’s undershirt and Speroni’s Texan ties. They ended up calling it “Ostruzionix”.