Lega Victory

Surely, this isn’t all new. Meloni is following in the footsteps of the late Silvio Berlusconi, who in 1994 brought the secessionist Lega into his first government.

For the Lega, passing this bill mattered a great deal: there were tears of joy in the Senate from its promoter, Minister of Regional Autonomies Roberto Calderoli, and Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who hailed it a “historic day.” Still, the move is pretty unpopular. For the two politicians, it might well be the pinnacle of their careers — and a lifeline after they underperformed in recent national and then European elections. But 45 percent of Italians oppose the law, and only 35 percent actually back it, polls show. The PD is reportedly working toward a referendum to scrap the law.

Differentiated autonomy has been called out even by the European Union for its risk of widening the North-South divide. Southern regions are indeed on a war footing, including those led by Forza Italia, the late Berlusconi’s party, despite the fact that as part of Meloni’s coalition it voted for the law. The Forza Italia president of the Calabria region, Roberto Occhiuto, called it “an error” that will antagonize Southerners.

Speaking of antagonists, the theatrical PD president of Campania (the region around Naples), Vincenzo De Luca, known for his wars of words with Meloni, is heading the front to undo the norm. “The rich will be richer, the poor will be poorer,” he told journalists, adding that Meloni’s reforms “are putting democracy at risk.” Last February, De Luca brought the mayors of Campania to parliament to protest the plan, and even quarreled with riot police blocking the way to the building.

To give an idea of the intense political climate, days before the vote a Lega MP physically attacked an opposition Five Star lawmaker who was waving an Italian flag in protest. To celebrate their victory, Lega members in the Senate instead pulled out the banner of Padania, an imaginary nation set in the Po Valley plains that the Lega considers its heartland. This is the same territory where Lega supporters used to partake in bizarre quasi-Nordic rituals, wearing horned caps and paying their respects to the waters of the river Po.

In the future, each region will negotiate its desired level of autonomy. But first, they will have to show they are able to fund a certain level of quality in health care, education, and other services. Similar demands were already discussed in the past with the Lombardy and Veneto regions. Even PD-run regions like Campania have asked for similar privileges — albeit never on the same scale, and never with success.

Indeed, in many ways this reform isn’t only the fault of the Lega or its allies. It was the center left that in 2001 passed a constitutional change granting the possibility of more independent regions. The Meloni bill only realizes the potential of that reform, albeit taking it to an extreme degree. For Calderoli: “Like it or not, we are enacting the constitution.”

Fly Me to the Premierato

The prime minister is pretty confident that the premierato is worth all the fuss.

Her reform will grant more power to the prime minister at the expense of all the other powers in the Republic. Handing the executive such freedom of action, it will create a situation that postwar politicians, wary of a fascist revival, wanted to avoid when drafting the current republican constitution in 1946–47.

Currently, citizens only elect MPs. The prime minister is then proposed by the winning parties and then formally designated by the president of the Republic. The President does not run the Republic’s day-to-day government, but rather monitors the respect of the democratic process — and in this vein can dissolve parliament, call new elections, or choose a new premier that the parliament must then vote on. The President can refuse to sign laws, forcing parliament to discuss them once more.

Under the premierato reform, the prime minister will instead be directly elected and have a guaranteed parliamentary majority. A still-to-be-drafted new electoral law, granting a “bonus” of extra seats for the largest coalition, is meant to define how this majority is calculated.

Critics believe that this system giving the premier a guaranteed majority in parliament — and free rein to push through their agenda even with a minority of votes — would hand their minor allies more seats than their popularity would justify. It would mean bringing MPs into parliament that people never directly voted for.

Something similar has in fact occurred under past electoral laws. Indeed, in 1994 the Lega was the biggest single force in the lower house despite winning just 8 percent of votes, thanks to the majority bonus it enjoyed as a Berlusconi ally and other mechanisms in force at the time.

“The premierato is not democracy anymore, it weakens parliament and the head of the state [i.e., the president’s office],” Schlein told the press. “The point is not the method of election but a less independent parliament,” she said, adding that the creation of such a system would be a world first.

Under the proposed model, the premier would also have the power to dissolve parliament — today a prerogative of the president of the Republic — select a second premier from the same majority in the case of a cabinet crisis, or call for new elections. The proposal is, in fact, a mess: “90 percent of constitutionalists have criticized the reform, even some of those closer to the government,” Roberta Calvano, constitutional law professor at Rome’s Unitelma Sapienza University, told Jacobin.

But in pursuing the reform, Meloni is fulfilling Berlusconi’s dream even more radically than he could have dreamt of. He tried to increase the prime minister’s powers in 2006 but lost a national referendum on the change. The same happened to then Democratic prime minister Matteo Renzi’s 2016 proposal to reduce the power of the Senate and speed up the legislative process.

Indeed, while Renzi has since left the PD to form his own centrist party, such constitutional change isn’t just a right-wing idea. Already in the 1994 elections, as Meloni likes to repeat, Achille Occhetto — at the time leader of the post-communist Democratic Party of the Left (the precursor of the PD) — had envisaged a premierato-like reform. For thirty years, the Italian left’s own tendency to strengthen the executive and the single leader has been preparing the ground for the current right–wing campaign.

Meloni is playing all her cards to push this reform through. As her vice premier, Forza Italia leader Antonio Tajani, put it, she will get it through even if there is no compromise with opposition forces. Her majority in both chambers of the Parliament grants her the power to do this, at least for now. But since the government loves praising its own moderation, Minister of Institutional Reforms Maria Elisabetta Casellati recently reassured us that there was still time to improve the reform. “The text is not finished yet. I never consider anything closed,” she said in a radio interview. The opposition parties certainly hope it isn’t.

Stability

The premierato reform has been promoted as a solution to Italy’s well-known political instability. In the seventy-eight years since the Republic was founded in 1946, Italy has seen sixty-eight governments. Admittedly, many were just cabinet reshuffles of the same parliamentary majority or even the same parties, usually Christian Democracy and its allies, without new elections.

In Italy, the term of a legislature and an executive is nominally five years, but in practice no government has lasted that long. Berlusconi’s second government was the longest-running, surviving almost four years between 2001 and 2005, before an eventual cabinet crisis. Elected parties often reshuffle alliances, and the majority is difficult to retain.

In this sense, the premierato bill strikes a chord with Italians’ desperation at their politics. Constitutional reforms can be subject to approval by referendum, and the opposition says it is ready to start collecting signatures to hold one if all else fails. Still, according to polls, between 48 and 55 percent of Italians favor the reform.

Perhaps the problem is what they’re being told about what it actually is. Since the 2022 election the Rai public TV network has been pressured by the Meloni government to broadcast positive coverage of the coalition parties. Rai journalists went on strike for media freedom in May, after episodes of blatant censorship and propaganda and purges of nonaligned journalists. The network even accused its own journalists of “spreading fake news.” Rai has received the title of “Tele-Meloni” given its lack of independence.

But more important is that — whatever the issues with Italian politics — this reform tackles them in a weakly democratic way, swaying the system in a more top-heavy direction. “It’s the umpteenth effort to make the constitution a culprit for the problems of the political system,” Calvano said.

If with the reform the premier will eat up parts of the president’s powers, this also reflects the right-wing parties’ long struggle with this institutional figure. They have been on collision course with the head of state since President Giorgio Napolitano asked the European Union–backed technocrat Mario Monti to form a new government after the resigning Berlusconi had almost bankrupted the country in 2011. Monti’s government soon became notorious for pushing through European austerity policies. There was another such intervention in 2021, when current president Sergio Mattarella called on former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi to form a new government amid the pandemic crisis.

This development has often followed the fiasco of a right-wing government, favoring the creation of emergency centrist coalitions, governments of national unity, or cross-party cabinets led by the PD. One of the reasons for Meloni’s popularity is that she always opposed all such governments over the last decade.

These were highly traumatic experiences for the Right — and these parties unofficially made it their priority to curb the powers of the president. But this also falls into a pattern of trying to change the law when it weakens the strength of right-wing parties. After recent municipal elections saw them lose important cities in second-round votes, the Meloni coalition even wants to get rid of such run-off ballots.

Concentrated

But the reform may indeed pass. “I’m afraid it is not enough to tell Italians that this is an authoritarian model to rally them against the premierato,” Calvano comments. She adds that Italians have developed a favorable opinion of concentrating power in the hands of one leader.

Other minor center-right parties in the opposition actually offered Meloni help in shaping the reform, like Carlo Calenda’s Azione and Renzi’s Italia Viva — formerly united in a so-called Third Pole alliance — only to then regret it as their help was ignored.

The premierato reform has recently passed a first round of votes in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, the two houses of the Italian parliament, and is due for a second, final round.

“For months, the opposition has tried to discuss the text of the bill and then to stall the law with thousands of pretext amendments,” Calvano said. But it didn’t work. Yet the fight will go on, also because of the great symbolism of this constitutional issue.

If the premierato passes, then Meloni, leader of a party rooted in historical fascism, would have the satisfaction of rewriting a constitution authored by the anti-fascist parties who led the resistance. Her party members are still partaking in fascist ceremonies and openly calling for a fascist revival, as a recent investigation by news site Fanpage showed. It seems the losers of the war are finally taking revenge on the winners.

This symbolism was teased by Meloni herself during a conference to introduce the reform in May. Her speech put emphasis on the fact that “the constitution belongs to everybody,” in a tacit reference to the political marginalization of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano in postwar decades.

Moreover, the shock of “differentiated autonomy” and the threat of the premierato might succeed in rebuilding a common front on the center-left of Italian politics. PD, Five Star Movement, and other opposition parties were together in protest in Rome in June, vowing to overcome their differences.

“The premierato and differentiated autonomy are a vendetta against the anti-fascist constitution. Hard times are coming, we are in the middle of the night,” the president of the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) grimly told bystanders during the protest.

In a recent Facebook Live address — a typical intervention by the prime minister with no one to quiz or challenge her — Meloni accused the opposition of “irresponsible civil war tones” and “defending the status quo.” Meloni often answers any reference to her party’s neofascist roots by accusing the Left of talking in “civil war tones.” It is harder to see how exactly “defending the status quo” can be taken as example of insurgency.

Ultimately, these changes are still part of the fallout of the Italian party system that broke up at the end of the twentieth century. Nothing has been the same in Italy after the 1990s corruption scandal “Tangentopoli” caused the fall of every major party, starting with the Socialists. From amid the ruins, for many Berlusconi emerged as the only valid alternative.

Since then, without the parties that had created and shaped the Republic over its first half-century, the Italian democratic system has malfunctioned, especially in a period marked by poor economic prospects.

The premierato reform, alongside the differentiated autonomy plan, might succeed in killing the Italian Republic as we know it. Veteran journalist Natalia Aspesi fears the return of the strong leader, and on her ninety-fifth birthday even told La Repubblica: “I was born and I will die under fascism.” Such a claim is surely rather overblown. But Aspesi is right on one thing: if the reform passes, the constitution will no longer be what the antifascist politicians of the post–World War II years decided it should be.