2023-06-25 21:58:21
The question of our form of government has been openly open since 1948. Closing it would mean completing rather than reforming the Constitution. If, after 75 years, it is possible to resume the work of the Constituent Assembly, it is because the parliamentary arc finally seems to coincide with the constitutional arc, within the framework of the European order. “To complete” means to innovate: but along the path of the time which was of substance and parliamentary control. Stability and effectiveness of government must therefore follow that course without jerks.
We have known from the outset that the position of the Prime Minister, however large his majority may be (and however decisive his powers, in the meantime acquired in the Euro-national system), is not guaranteed by a constitutional basis against “degeneration” short-term policy. Remaining in the parliamentary system, this guarantee can be built by writing in the Constitution that whoever presides over the government and directs its action must be elected by Parliament in joint chambers. With the consequent mechanism of constructive distrust which, on the one hand, is the premise of durability for government programmes; on the other, it ensures Parliament an instrument that is not merely demolishing but capable of giving life, in the event of an irreversible crisis, to another majority. A constitutional integration, therefore, to favor a “government by legislature”: consistent with our European multi-year commitments.
Could we do better with a directly elected “type of government”? No. The Constituents explicitly excluded presidentialism on the grounds that it would not “respond to the conditions of Italian society”. It was an objective criterion, not an ideological one. The conviction prevailed that the direct election of the top government in a politically fragmented society – and moreover separated from the communist question – would have caused an irremediable fracture of legitimacy.
Everything has changed since then, but not the method of political realism to follow in choosing the form of government. Today the social “conditions” to actually look at are those of a mass society of isolated individuals. A society essentially defenseless in the face of digital populism, invasive according to logics adverse to the principles of pluralism.
It would be out of our time to shut up in the legal-formal enclosure, closing one’s eyes in the face of threats that signal the end of illusions about the instruments of direct democracy. Their political sustainability fatally decreases as evidence on the vulnerability of an atomized society grows: in the great vacuum of grassroots party mediation. There would therefore not only be the decomposition of a consolidated constitutional balance: one that finds its anchorage in the role of the President of the Republic, a role not made up exclusively of written rules. The wedge of direct elections, both of the top state and of the Prime Minister, would bring into the heart of our political coexistence all the social risks – indeed, already the failures – which the reason of the world is frantically trying to cope with.
The uncertainties of reality require, if anything, remedies that go in the opposite direction, that is, innovations in representation, in intermediation, in counterweights, in minority “reserves”: in short, an updated need for parliamentarianism.
The primary task of current constitutionalism is to build dikes against the growing powers of manipulation of public opinion. And this task is not in contrast to, but complementary to the other – which cannot be renounced – of strengthening government action.
June 25, 2023, 21:57 – edit June 25, 2023 | 21:57
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