Giving voters the opportunity to choose their Prime Minister… Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called on the French to elect him “Prime Minister” during the 2022 legislative campaign, would have dreamed of it. Italy may be on the verge of doing so. In the hemicycle of the Palazzo Montecitorio, the deputies have been examining for almost two weeks a draft constitutional revision which provides for the election of the President of the council by direct universal suffrage for five years.
A first on the Old Continent, against which a huge part of the opposition is up in arms. “Democracy is more complex than acclaiming a leader once every five years and then letting him do what he wants,” criticizes elected Democrat Elly Schlein. The leader of the 5 Star Movement Giuseppe Conte, for his part, denounced a reform which would make the President of the Republic “a paper pusher”. “Parliament will be subject to the Prime Minister. This does not happen in any country in the world,” he added.
The government coalition forms a united front
Accusations brushed aside by the President of the Council, Giorgia Meloni. “The Democratic Party and the 5 Star Movement do not want reform, they do not want to change, they prefer to continue making governments in the Palace [la chambre des députés, NDLR]and decide without consulting the Italians, choosing unelected Prime Ministers who don’t know anyone.”
And although an adversary in the European campaign, his ally in the government, Matteo Salvini, came to the aid of the president of Fratelli d’Italia. “We are working towards a more modern, more efficient, faster, more meritocratic country, so that autonomy gives more powers to local authorities and the direct election of the Prime Minister gives more weight to the vote of citizens” he said. thus argues the boss of Lega on the sidelines of a visit to the port of Beverello in Naples.
The risky option of the referendum
But before being adopted, this text which also provides for the removal of senators for life – with the exception of former presidents of the Republic – and the establishment of the obligation to dissolve the two chambers at the same time, must go through a very strict legislative path. According to article 138 of the Constitution, any constitutional revision must be adopted by two thirds of the elected representatives of both houses of Parliament, less than three months apart. Failing this, the government could submit the constitutional revision directly to voters, by referendum.
An initiative which is, however, not without risk. By calling Italians to the polls, the government coalition would expose itself to attempts to “sanction vote”. A possibility that the opposition intends to exploit two weeks before the European election. This is how since the arrival of the text in the Chamber of Deputies, opportunism trials have been going well. Will Giorgia Meloni deem it necessary to hammer home: “I am not doing it for myself, but for those who will succeed me.”
Resignation, not resignation?
Aware of the risks to which she is exposed by calling a referendum, the President of the Council this Sunday, May 26, removed any ambiguity on the consequences of rejecting the reform. “If the referendum doesn’t pass? It doesn’t matter, I won’t leave,” said Giorgia Meloni casually at the RAI microphone on the Mezz’Ora show. A direct distancing between her political destiny and the initiative that she herself nicknamed a few weeks earlier “the mother of all reforms”, and which appeared as a wait-and-see change of register by her opponents.
“Superimposing one’s political trajectory on the destiny of the country with this lightness is unacceptable,” lectured the leader of the Democratic Party. Even more incisive, the former President of the Council Matteo Renzi did not fail to remind him that, in his place, he had resigned after the failure of the 2016 referendum. “If you lose, you will have to resign, as I did it and like David Cameron did in Britain after Brexit.”
In fact, however, no provision in the Italian Constitution obliges a Prime Minister to leave Palazzo Chigi in the event of failure of a referendum, even a constitutional one. But the unfavorable outcome of a popular consultation is no less a disavowal of the power in place. In politics, this translates at best into a demobilization of historical support, and at worst into a flight of votes from competing parties. But Meloni seems to stand his ground and punctuates his interventions with the traditional: “I will not back down.”