Italy is a singular country, where not a few politicians (new and old) play too many parts on the scene of Parliament, contributing to its debasement. In fact, listening to the debate on the electoral law it might seem that many women and many men sit in Parliament from a political system on another planet. We witness the scene in which the "named and self-appointed" of the past scold, without a semblance of self-criticism, the potential "named and self-appointed" future. All complaining that, with the electoral law under discussion, the "scepter" is not returned to the citizen for the choice of his representative in the Chamber. Theft of the "scepter" due to the overwhelming power of the secretariats of the parties who "appoint" who is destined to win and who to lose.
The question that naturally arises is when the scepter was ever placed in the hands of the voting citizen, both during the first and second republics, and at the end of the third. Evidently many of those who complain forget the pages and pages of the newspapers dedicated to telling the story of the parties or the two heads of the pentastellati (Grillo and Casaleggio: two for all and all for two) to choose who to place in the "safe" constituencies and those to be placed in "disposable" colleges.
In the past, the best at performing these tasks were the men of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party (later PDS and PD), regardless of the lack of mandate.
The former were the most able to contain the risk of electing unwanted people to the national secretariat and to the under-secretaries of the various currents that animated the party in the various areas of Italy.
The latter were much quicker than the former in respecting the different souls of the party and in guaranteeing the long stay of their national and peripheral leaders (still today in Parliament among those who complain about the theft of the scepter) by retiring the officials who had dedicated life to the party itself.
Naturally, both the former and the latter knew that they ran some risk in envisaging the victory of some and the defeat of others, but both could afford, running additional risks, to "appoint" to parliament people who did not have their own electorate (the so-called independent parliamentarians). But those who recently perfected the system in order to eliminate any uncertainty and eliminate any ex ante risk were the grillini who entrust the nomination of potential winners to a two-headed leader made up of a human head and a joint stock company. And to be sure that ex post there is no risk of disobedience to the two-headed leader, they would like to impose the bond of mandate, as happened at the time of the Paris Commune which had chosen the red flag as its banner. Nonetheless, the pentastellati are the ones who scream the most. Ours is a strange country indeed.
