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Franco Bechis
It was the last sentence of Sergio Mattarella’s end-of-year speech to the Italians. “Dear fellow citizens and fellow citizens, what begins will be my last year as President of the Republic.” A bowler hat thrown on Italian political life.
The many Italians who, being walled alive in their homes by government regulations, tuned in to one of the many television channels transmitted by the President of the Republic, will not have caught anything relevant.
However, there is a detail. This is not Mattarella’s last year in the Quirinale, and barring highly unlikely early resignations like those given by Francesco Cossiga before his term ends, next New Year we will all hear a new year-end speech from Mattarella on television. So “what begins will be my last year” should not be taken literally. But it is a clear message for Parliament and precisely for Italian political life: Mattarella has wanted to say right now that he has no ambition to run again for the Quirinale. An indirect invitation to political leaders not to sleep, imagining that if there are no other solutions, the same script that started Giorgio Napolitano’s second term could be repeated. With that little phrase, the Head of State on New Year’s Eve eliminated the hypothesis of his renomination from future scenarios. There is still a long time to decide, and Mattarella himself could change his mind with great insistence, but that has already meant for the next big voters.
At the beginning of this year, the succession of the Quirinale certainly does not seem to be one of the most urgent needs for Italian public life. Not only because Mattarella exists and is rather loved by Italians, who has never been in his divisive mandate: in front of us we still have the coronavirus, the hidden hope of doubling the pandemic, the ongoing vaccines, the 209 billion promised by the European Union. With the Recovery Fund, a very serious economic crisis that even if those resources came now and suddenly it would be very difficult to overcome.
It is true that there is much more urgent that touches much more the life of Italians. But the issue of Mattarella’s succession is not that far off on the moon. The President of the Republic has important powers in Italy, perhaps the most relevant in Europe in non-presidential regimes such as the French. And linked to the election of the successor there is an issue that is not as abstract as that of the recovery of full democracy in a country that for many reasons had to put it in the background in the year of the pandemic, even forcing the besieged mechanisms as it was. of an undoubted emergency.
We can tell ourselves what we want, but the role of Parliament has not been central in the last year as our Constitution would like. The most striking example occurred at the end of the year, with the passage of the Budget Act, the most important act of the political year, with the Senate expelled from its examination as never before in Republican history. Recovering the just constitutional balances of our democracy is, therefore, as urgent as leaving the pandemic behind. It is evident that the election of the next President of the Republic is not secondary on this path.
As is well known, a new institutionality is law and is part of the Constitution of our Republic that greatly reduces the members of the two Houses. But both assemblies are still anchored to the old Constitution that is no longer in force, and are made up of 945 elected parliamentarians and not the 600 that now establish articles 56 and 57 of our fundamental charter.
Not only that: from all the consultations carried out so far and from the polls that are published every week it appears that the current composition of the Italian Parliament is far removed from popular sentiment. Now, to think that a position as delicate and relevant as that of President of the Republic that lasts seven years can be decided by a Parliament that is not the one provided for in the current Constitutional Charter and so far removed from the sentiment of Italians runs the risk of be a very serious wound for the functioning of Italian democracy.
I think that Mattarella himself is aware of this wound, and that the threat of dissolution of the legislature filtered by the Quirinal in the face of the hypothesis of a political crisis has nothing instrumental. It is never a tragedy to speak to people, even at such a time. Not only that: I think that between now and the end of July (before the white semester), this is still a step to take.
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