A presidential republic for Italy? – working world

On February 3, 2022, the mandate of the President of the Republic ends: Sergio Mattarella. As per the Constitution, the Italian parliamentarians will be called upon to elect the new tenant of the Quirinale: a decision to be taken in a completely changed political scenario since the beginning of this legislature, as is well known, without historical precedents both internally and internationally .
The purpose of this brief reading is neither pedagogical nor academic, limiting itself to formulating a provocative proposal for a complete revision of our republican system. The title of this brief reflection introduces us to the theme without delay, through the question: “A presidential republic for Italy?”
That’s what it’s about. Our country has been experiencing a political-institutional short-circuit for over thirty years, from the moment in which the change in the electoral systems of local authorities – such as for the Municipalities and Regions – in a majority and presidentialist direction, was not accompanied by an appropriate change in the national political system, which remained hinged on proportionalist logics.
If on the one hand we have witnessed a distortion of the law of local authorities, with legislation that has tended to greater accountability and governance of local authorities, on the other hand the failure to implement a constitutional reform capable of addressing the crucial issues of of the Prime Minister and bicameralism still leaves open a democratic question of no small importance.
This question does not concern any illegitimacy of electoral processes, but rather their ‘scarce efficiency’ on the political-institutional level. If, in fact, the relationship between general elections and the Presidency of the Council has always been problematic, the latter is today aggravated by the further factor of confusion represented by social media; so much so that more than one believes that “likes” on these platforms can replace votes, or that the so-called “influencers” can replace years of study, qualified experience, or political participation.
By carrying out an aseptic analysis free from any moral aspect, a plastic manifestation of this inconsistency between popular expression by means of voting and the identification of the President of the Council on duty is clearly offered by the present legislature, where from Count I , born from the union between the Five Star Movement and the League, we move on to the Democratic Party-Five Star Movement Conte II, to finally reach the newly appointed Draghi government which completely renews the political and ideological orientation of the beginning of this legislature.
Like it or not, this is the Italian political scenario of the last three and a half years. A constantly changing picture, with respect to which citizens are now helpless, having expressed themselves only on the policies of 2018.
It could be objected that the inability to know how to regenerate one’s own form of government is inherent in the party system, which has now been in crisis for about thirty years. But perhaps the roots of the problem go back further. Already during the First Republic (1948 – 1994), the average life of governments was about ten months each; yet, in this period of time – in which fundamental historical events took place such as the end of the Cold War in the international sphere, together with the season of Tangentopoli in the internal sphere – we had strong, structured, organized parties in Italy, with their own school internal; and yet they have proved incapable of setting up the republican order on long-lived and significant governments.
Our form of government presents critical issues that go beyond the systemic crisis of the parties in Italy. In 1980 in his “A Republic to reform”, well before the historical events already mentioned – the end of the Cold War and the advent of Tangentopoli – Giuliano Amato wrote: “The Italian Prime Minister is not a Prime Minister but a composer of dissent that has the sole purpose of saving the life of his government, whose inland waters are never calm.”
The reasons for these critical issues are, therefore, distant and have an institutional character, having their roots in the choices made by the Constituent Assembly. In this regard, it is perhaps appropriate to go back to the reflections and studies of the time to understand it, and in particular those of one of the founding fathers, so inflated and often exploited: that of Piero Calamandrei. Fine jurist, as well as founder of the Action Party, Calamandrei proposed a presidential republic, with the system of checks and balances, similar to the United States of America, or a system similar to the premiership based on the Westminster model that exists in Great Britain , precisely to avoid the fragility of the executives – as has punctually occurred throughout our republican history – and, hand in hand, to curb any authoritarian drift, inherent both in the excessive centralization of powers and in institutional disorder, as happened with the advent of fascism.
In Calamandrei’s political and constitutional thought – just to name one of the many jurists and attentive observers of Italian institutions – the need for a decisive democracy remains of fundamental importance, governability an essential value, precisely because often the prelude to a dictatorship in the past it consists of a democracy incapable of influencing and deciding.
For this essential reason, to date, a profound rethinking of the institutional structures – and, in particular, of the political-institutional system – within which citizens can express themselves on the creation of the Government with a clear political direction, remains the mother of all the political issues to be resolved in Italy. Together with this, it is appropriate to complete the design of a new regionalism, through a complete reform of the Senate, the overcoming of the perfect bicameralism (present only by us, in Italy, and in Romania), which problematizes every legislative action for mere position benefits.
Observers who are legitimately critical of the presidential proposal – and who, quite honestly, observe the substantial ungovernability of Italy – can trust that the constitutional referendums of 2006, proposed by the Berlusconi government, and of 2016, proposed by the Renzi government, represent a deterrent’, also considering the short time that has passed since the respective consultations. The truth, however, is that the revision of the Second Part of our fundamental law remains the main issue, among the many Italian problems, which promptly reappears with every crisis or unprecedented event.
In fact, today we are facing a new scenario. The historical and unprecedented challenge posed by the pandemic, together with the need to correctly manage the National Recovery and Resilience Plan in the interest of future generations, require Italy to have a new republican order that can completely redesign the second part of the Constitution. Therefore, we close with a question: “why not think of a presidential republic for Italy, where the voters express themselves directly on the President of the Republic? Why not think of a Republic with certain executives and ‘legislature’, and characterized by an ‘opposition statute’, as happens in other parts of the world where democracy has been consolidated for at least two centuries?”