On 4
December 2016 Italian electors will be called to vote on a Referendum on
Constitutional reform and a new electoral law. The question posed to electors
is: “Do you approve the text of the constitutional law concerning ‘norms for
overcoming perfect bicameralism, the reduction in the number of parliamentarians,
the containment of the costs of institutions, the abolition of CNEL [the
advisory National Council for Economy and Labour] and the revision of Title V
of Part II of the Constitution’ approved by the Italian Parliament and
published in the Official Gazette n. 88 of 15 April 2016?" YES/NO. Being a
confirmation and not an abrogation Referendum no quorum is required for its
validity.
Such a
question is tendentious. The constitutional law in question does not abolish the
Senate, it simply transforms perfect bicameralism into asymmetric (and less
directly democratic) bicameralism, turning the Senate into a Chamber elected by
a selectorate of mayors and regional
councillors among themselves, instead of being elected directly by “the people”
as art. 1 of the 1948 Constitution provides. What the new law abolishes is the
Senate’s power to bring down the government in a confidence vote, while retaining
for the proposed Senate dual legislative powers on a broad range of questions,
from local issues to European directives. The number of senators is reduced
from 395 to 100 (21 mayors, 74 regional councillors and 5 nominated by the
President) but there is almost no reduction in cost; far from the €500mn
boasted of by Renzi, it is officially estimated at €50mn a year – equivalent to
one day of Italian military expenditure, or a fraction of the tax that FIAT avoids
by moving its headquarters to the Netherlands. And even that tiny cost
reduction in keeping the Senate at all is matched by the only part time
involvement (two days per month) of the new senators most of whose time
naturally is taken up by their local administrative duties. The 630 members of
the lower Chamber with their generous salaries, golden pensions and handshakes,
bonuses, allowances and expenses entitlements, remain untouched.
Il Fatto Quotidiano (11 October) proposes spelling out and unbundling the long mixed
question drafted by the government asking specifically whether electors
approve:
· the abolition of elections for the Senate, which will be made up of
mayors and regional councillors nominated by regional Councils i.e. by parties,
not elected by the electorate, and empowered to legislate in the face of
popular sovereignty;
· the concession of parliamentary immunity (from surveillance, arrest and prosecution)
to mayors and regional councillors nominated as senators without ever having
been elected as legislators and therefore not entitled to that privilege;
· the complication of methods for law approval, passing from 2 to 10, or
to 7, 9 or 13 according to the interpretation given to the incomprehensible
text of the reform;
· the trebling, from 50,000 to 150,000, of the number of signatures needed
to introduce a law by popular initiative;
· the survival of a Senate that will be able to or be compelled to –
according to the subject matter – re-vote and modify all the laws approved by
the Chamber of Deputies, replicating and complicating the bicameralism (even in
its reformed asymmetry rather than current parity) that is alleged to be
abrogated;
· the expropriation of the powers of Regions to protect their populations,
territories, security and environment from useless large-scale, costly and polluting
public works (such as the Turin-Lyon TAV, the Third Crossing [Valico], the bridge on the Messina
Strait, oil drilling on land and at sea, regasification plants, etc.) which
will be decided by the Prime Minister in Rome alone and in command.
In order to raise YES support falling
behind in the South and on the Right Matteo Renzi has just resurrected the
multibillion euro project of the longest suspension bridge in the world connecting
Sicily with the mainland, associated with Silvio Berlusconi’s premiership, and which
Renzi had fiercely opposed in 2012. The project was abandoned in 2013 because
of its high costs and dubious benefits, it being a long-term mafia objective,
and the strait’s vulnerability to earthquakes. There are more pressing needs
and better growth-promoting projects in anti-seismic investment, rail and road
transport improvements, and environmental protection and reclamation. Tony Barber in
the Financial Times spoke of Renzi’s reforms as the “constitutional bridge to
nowhere” – nicely put were it not for the fact that opening to the mafia does
not lead to nowhere but to the further criminalisation of the Italian state.
On 16 October Andrea Camilleri,
Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Nadia Urbinati, Paolo Flores d’Arcais and Tomaso
Montanari, Why we vote NO, posed the
question that is really being asked in the referendum:
“Do you want to count less, to have
less democracy, to give a free hand?”.
“We will answer NO,” they write, “…
We do not want to give a free hand to this or to any other government. An inept
and often corrupt political class tries to convince us that the Constitution is
at fault, but this is not true. To those who tell us that to make Italy work it
is necessary to change the rules we answer: we, instead, want to change the
players”.
(See also
PELLECCHIA Intellettuali del bel paese dove il sì suona, MARTELLI Se Renzi è un oligarca, SOMMA Benigni, la Costituzione e la
Brexit, DE LUCA Politici corrotti, giù le mani dalla Carta, FORGES DAVANZATI La finanza e la controriforma costituzionale. See also Noi votiamo NO; Zagrebelsky and Pallante, Loro Diranno, Noi Diremo, Travaglio and Truzzi, Perche’ NO, La Valle La Verita’ sul Referendum, a set of replies NoFattoDaVoi).
The present Parliament was elected on
the strength of electoral law 270 of 21 December 2005, named after its Lega
proponent, Roberto Calderoli, and better known as the Porcellum from the name (una porcata, a
pig’s breakfast) attached to it by the proponent himself, which in January 2014 was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional
Court (Sentence 1/2014). Continuity of state power required that Parliament
should continue to be legitimate in its functioning, but it is highly
questionable whether the current Parliament should have done anything other
than at most pass a new electoral law before being dissolved by the President, who
was himself elected by the current unconstitutional Parliament, moreover for a
second mandate not envisaged (although not specifically forbidden) by the
Constitution. Instead of which the unconstitutional Parliament with Napolitano’s
prodding launched itself at a major constitutional reform changing one third of
our Constitution.
Moreover, since its unconstitutional
election in February 2013 the Italian Parliament has achieved the unenviable
record of containing 246 turncoats (voltagabbana in Italian)
Members of Parliament changing sides, many of them more than once reaching a
total of 325 crossings of the floor, equivalent to about one third of the
combined membership of the Lower Chamber and the Senate (and rising weekly).
Berlusconi, a pioneer in establishing a market for parliamentarians, purchased
support that was decisive in toppling the Prodi government. With this kind of
tradition there is no way even the majority premium envisaged by the new Constitution
can guarantee a stable majority.
So the new Constitution dice are
loaded in favour of an authoritarian regime, where the leader of the party
enjoying a guaranteed 55% majority in the Lower Chamber, who will be mostly his
own nominees under the party list electoral system, in addition to his and his
party’s new-Constitution Senate nominees, can play an exceptionally powerful
role in appointing: the Head of State, the members of the Constitutional Court,
the members of the Higher Council of Magistrates (CSM), the leading Authorities
responsible for sectoral functions, the RAI Board of Directors etc.; as well as
legislating and exercising executive power without having to face any real
opposition. And, as the UK has found, the collapse of the Labour Party and its
subsequent failure to realise a real opposition has adverse consequences for the
country, and for Europe.
Gustavo Zagrebelsky, the former
President of the Constitutional Court, states that the combination of the new
electoral law (the so called Italicum, whereby 2/3 of deputies will
be nominated by party leaders), and the reforms linked to it by a YES in the
Referendum would remove the checks and balances so judiciously introduced in the
post-Fascist 1948 Constitution to prevent any return of authoritarianism of any
kind, and create the conditions for “a shift from democracy to oligarchy”. Indeed,
under Italicum a party commanding
only 20%-25% of the votes in the first ballot might access a second ballot and
beat the only other remaining competitor, thus gaining the winner’s premium to
end up with a statutory 55% majority.
The concept of oligarchy must not be
confused with that of minority. Government is always necessarily exercised
by a minority, but whether or not this is an oligarchy depends on whether power
is exercised for the benefit of that ruling minority and its goals, or for the
collective benefit of society, in which case it is not an oligarchy but a
representative democracy – as the historian Emilio Gentile observed in his rebuttal
of Eugenio Scalfari, the Repubblica
editorialist’s crass claim that oligarchy is the only possible form of
democracy. Moreover – as Gentile pointed out – any democracy is intensely
vulnerable to the oligarchic globalisation of economic and financial powers
interfering with national policy-making, a major constituent of the “post-democracy”
theorised by Colin Crouch. The risk is of a democracy in which the people are only
comparse (extras) acting an insignificant part on the political stage at
the time of the election leaving the exercise of power to party and government
oligarchies, demagogic leaders, a corrupt political class, a degraded political
culture and the method of populist slogans and announcements.
Renzi is simply the current
mouthpiece and tool for the implementation of the Piano di Rinascita Democratica (Plan for Democracy Reborn), an authoritarian project initiated in
Italy by Licio Gelli of the P2 secret Masonic Lodge (drafted around 1976,
published in 1982), and pursued by Craxi, Cossiga, Berlusconi, Napolitano, with
the blessing of international financial circles such as JP Morgan (2013),
not to mention the support obtained through undue interference by the US Ambassador and Barack Obama in his
role as the President of the US.
JP Morgan claimed that in Europe
“Constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence, reflecting the
political strength that left wing parties gained after the defeat of fascism.
Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the
following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions;
constitutional protection of labor rights; consensus building systems which
foster political clientalism [sic]; and the right to protest if unwelcome
changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this
political legacy have been revealed by the crisis.” The Renzi regime’s
attempted scrapping of the Italian 1948 Constitution is custom-tailored to JP
Morgan’s specifications.
For my part, I will vote a convinced
NO, and encourage all my readers who have a vote to do the same on 4 December
next.
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