Come esautorare il parlamento. Un caso esemplare del declino di una democrazia rappresentativa

The essay deals with the long crisis of the Italian parliamentary system as well as the hypothesis that it may overwhelm representative democracy itself. The study moves from an analysis of the events which have marked first two years of the XVIII Italian parliament in order to identify four ways in which parliament itself may be overwhelmed. All of them occurred during the last quarter of a century: the attack on representativeness of the Chambers as well as on parliamentarians; the debasement of confidence procedures and the lack of accountability of Government towards Parliament; the reduction and marginalization of public debate within Parliament; the displacement of the legislative function of the Chambers in favor of the government. These phenomena should not be considered as a mere adaptation to the change of the political system; in fact, they question the fundamental principles of parliamentarism and the idea of representative democracy as laid down by the Constitution. This analysis is confirmed by the political events of the XVIII parliament, during which the leaders of the main political forces represented in parliament predicted the overcoming of the representative principle as a possible outcome to the Italian political crisis. The many attempts to weaken the parliament stem from the continued loss of value of the Constitutional rules related to the form of government and it also derives from the emerging idea of a democracy only meant to give its consent to rules that come from elsewhere instead from the parliament. This conception, that degrades representative democracy into a system merely aimed at the appointment of leaders needed to lead the executive branch – intended as a center of the whole decision-making process – is radically stranger to the paradigm of parliamentarism and it is unable to express a coherent and efficient functioning model of parliamentary system. In this context, the strength of the Constitution and the role played by other constitutional bodies have proven to be crucial for the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and for the survival of representative State as a whole. The Italian context shows how, today, the fate of the representative State depends on the proper functioning of political links between representatives and constituents. It also depends on the possibility to extend the principles of representative democracy to the organization and the internal procedures of those political and institutional players that have been revealed extraneous to those principles, which instead today appear crucial for the life of the constitutional system.