Only four days to approve the maneuver: it's a record. If – as is now certain – the Chamber also gives the go-ahead by tonight, this very rapid process by Parliament will go down in history. Exactly four days: the discussion in the Senate began on Tuesday in the Budget Committee (on Monday the committee was "limited" to a series of hearings on the subject), the conclusion today, Friday, in the Chamber.
And to arrive at such a rapid conclusion, the Chamber also derogates from a regulatory practice, which provides for a 24-hour stop to courtroom work from the moment in which the Government raises the question of trust to the moment in which the vote is taken. Gone are the days when whole months were discussed to approve an economic package and often they weren't even enough. Those were the years of the Budget law, of the assaults on the diligence, when the maneuver was targeted by the most disparate amendments and expanded dramatically.
The so-called "budget session" began in October and continued until the end of the year, the deadline by which the budget law had to be approved, under penalty of recourse to the provisional exercise. And precisely because the maneuver by dint of amendments and sub-amendments was crammed with everything and more, the provisional exercise was resorted to in a flurry: in the years from '77 to '80 and from '81 to '88. A trend that characterized practically a decade, until the by now famous tears and blood maneuver of the Amato Government, in '92.
There, the heaviness and urgency of the situation required rapid interventions: on 11 July decree no. 333 for the recovery of public finances was presented to the Chamber and not even a month later, on 7 August, it received the definitive yes from the Senate for conversion into law. It is from that period that the summer corrective maneuvers – also a consolidated ritual – were then approved within 30 days as opposed to the usual sixty. But in four days just never.
