Italy’s Constitutional Reform on the Premiership: The Risks of an Institutional Crisis

The proposed constitutional reform seeks to address issues rooted in the political-representative system with legal tools, attempting to assert through the force of law, or rather, of the Constitution, a model that elsewhere relies mainly on the proper functioning of politics. The proposal is inadequate in relation to what it promises and ineffective in relation to what it aims to achieve. If the Government wants to address the issues of institutional delegitimization, which are indeed important, it cannot bet everything on increasing the stakes at the time of the elections and giving citizens a hasty choice of the leader, ac-cording to the logic of ‘the winner takes it all’, it must instead pursue a laborious effort to reconnect citizens with the institutions, which goes through intermediary bodies, strengthening democracy at its foundations, not at its top.