Recourse to trust for the approval of legislative provisions has now become a practice for the executive. The numbers, referring to this legislature and the previous one, confirm how by now the process and the fate of a decree or a law are increasingly decided by the vote of confidence requested by the government rather than by the parliamentary activity of the House and Senate.
In these thousand days of legislature, the Renzi executive resorted to trust 77 times (as evidenced by the figures of the research office of the Chamber), therefore at an average of one trust every two weeks, to be exact every 12 days. The deputies were called to vote for confidence 41 times (the last one no later than last week, on the tax decree), while the senators 36 times. It is in particular on the conversion laws of the decrees that the executive is most active: 26 trusts requested from both the Chamber and the Senate (for a total of 52) in fact concerned 33 conversion laws.
The other trusts were requested on 10 laws: of stability 2014; stability 2015; stability 2016; electoral law for the Chamber; pdl on civil unions; law on metropolitan cities, provinces and merger of Municipalities; European law 2013; Jobs Act; law on the "good school"; traffic homicide. This legislature is no exception, if only we look at the previous one, the sixteenth, from 29 April 2008 to 14 March 2013. Net of the votes of confidence at the moment of the inauguration, the government has raised the question 97 times: 60 during the proceedings of the House, while in the Senate it has been appealed 37 times.
A significant part of the requests for confidence came from the Monti government, which succeeded the Berlusconi IV executive, and remained in office from 16 November 2011 to 27 March 2013. While Berlusconi resorted to trust 36 times, Monti turned to the House and Senate 16 times in his 61 months at the helm of the executive, at the rate of 3 trusts per month. A behavior - as evidenced by the "Government in Parliament" report of the XNUMXth legislature by the minister's cabinet office and the department for relations with Parliament - "to be placed in relation to the political and economic context in which the Government operated and to the particular configuration of the parliamentary majority that supported him".
