I reflect aloud on the reasons for the YES that I am about to formulate with the referendum vote, after the many discussions between friends and enemies.
With the repeated approval of the Parliament, according to the constitutional procedure, I assume that the decision entrusted to the people must fall on the political substance of the Reform; I do not presume to improve it to make the individual institutes that support the system appropriate to my desire; also out of respect for Parliament, where mediation has already taken place.
I share:
– The concentration of the Government's fiduciary relationship on a single Chamber, therefore strengthened, and also in the legislative procedure. Consequently, and only consequently, is the Government strengthened. The conditions exist for making the Government responsible for strategic projects, which a single chamber is better able to share, to answer to the electorate; even better if in the parliamentary confrontation the statute of the opposition is in turn strengthened, as expected. The responsibility of Parliament towards the elector becomes clear, even more so if an adequate electoral law makes the elected person decisively responsible towards his electors.
We know that the double trust had the aim of weakening the government, which found the strength to act in informal agreements between parties: government and opposition. For several decades this has been the political elaboration of the country (very opaque); perhaps it was necessary for the situation of the time, but today it is anachronistic and dangerous.
– The second chamber serves to represent territorial policy at the level of central institutions; it is the Chamber of the Regions, which ultimately elects it on behalf of the local elector. If it were elected directly by the national electorate, even with regional constituencies, it would lose this function, because its institutional connection with the territorial body would cease; there would remain a purely political informal connection, which only the party plot could coordinate informally in the shadow of the institutions. On the other hand, with the Senate nominated directly by the people, it would be difficult to explain the subtraction of the Government even from its trust; so much so that in cases of evident conflict, fiduciary dependence could arise again in practice.
– With the second chamber, the regions are much more present; effective in reclaiming their autonomy. Much clearer than the current one is the division of responsibilities between the State and the regions, which are limited for these compared to today, but which could be extended with a special law, on the condition of having the appropriate financial resources available. It is a part of the constitutional law that I would have liked different, I would have preferred a reduction in the number of the regions themselves. But this does not justify a vote against, aware of the difficult mediations, which in any case do not empty the political substance of the constitutional design.
I share the Reform also for the dangers that could ensue from the NO rejecting it.
– This design incorporates proposals matured for a long time in past years, in technical forums and in political attempts at reform, publicly discussed. If it doesn't go through, I fear the reappearance of the often advanced project, yes without sufficient maturation, of the presidential republic, of the direct appointment of the President of the Republic or the Prime Minister. In this regard, the comparison with the United States, with extremely widespread institutional powers, makes no sense; on the other hand, the French experience is not satisfactory in the distribution of powers, too concentrated on the President; in Italy it really could be the road to oligarchy, if not worse.
– Should the Reform be rejected, we would still find ourselves with an extremely weak Parliament. The weakness could not be corrected by the informal concert of organized politics in the parties, as happened in the past, for the collapse of the parties; and I wouldn't want it so corrected, due to the adversity I have for this way of doing politics, which allows agreements to escape institutional evidence. This negative situation has gotten worse, as experience has already shown us; it's the mess.
– Without the Reform, the electoral law entrusted to Parliament alone would become the substitute for the Reform; but, insufficient in the absence of the institutional framework, it would offer a dangerous alternative. In the extreme weakness of Parliament, the majority electoral law would give excessive strength to the executive; instead the proportional electoral law would find the executive in the function of expressing decisions, or mediations, which are made outside the formal institutions, decisions which today would not even be of parties, in any case politically responsible towards the elector, but of bodies of corporate interests.
If we look at the substance, it is not difficult to understand that the debate is between: those who intend to bring politics back to the institutions of Parliament and the Government, its trustee; and those who prefer the current condition of institutional paralysis which deprives citizens of political mediation in the formal seat of Parliament, to leave it to bodies capable of influencing a subjugated government, as a reflection of Parliament's weakness: we experience it all the time. There are many bodies that have been formed in recent years and that prefer to govern themselves, in the opaque context of private influences on the public. It is not curious, it is coherent that the same currents of the NO push for a proportional electoral law (already addressed by the Constitutional Court in the recent judgment on the electoral law).
The preference for the current state of things is not revealed, it remains underlying the electoral debate. In arguing against the reform, it is not expressly stated that it is supported by defects, even specious ones, on the regional side: the senators are to be elected directly by the national electoral college; will increase litigation (how to prove it?); it is a bad reform while it would take very little to make another one, preferred by silent citizens, etc.; the meaning of the referendum shifts, against or for the government in office, against Renzi; we hear others. But we do not hear the formal proposal to maintain equal bicameralism in the current situation. On the contrary, one side proposes holding elections immediately if the NO wins, with these electoral laws, and does not explain how the country can be governed afterwards. Curiously, superficially, The Economist has inserted itself into this context, declaring itself against the Reform because it is not needed to govern, given that Renzi governed, it would seem well, with the Constitution in force!.
It is the search for populist consensus, which means the search for adhesion by slogan: everything must be changed; we are different people! I prefer experienced people anyway, to the new for the new. Novelty is preached without explaining how things will be done; according to populist teaching, it is suggested to say little or nothing, also because one would not know what to say; intellectual denounces who would like to understand; denunciation considered terrible by those who take advantage of the good faith of ignorance to manipulate. Indeed, one must avoid the elitist flaw of intellectualism. Wasn't the experience of the League enough? All new, but which then, in fact, adapted to an old one that couldn't get any better than this. The story is very reminiscent of the adhesion to fascism of the first post-war period: the philosophy of intuition of the new intellectuals of the time.
In effect, the political struggle is between the rational and the irrational rather than between right and left, between liberal and socialism, where in the irrational there is the search for power by the rational autocrat, who uses the populist as an instrument of his autocracy; who intends to take advantage of the space that ignorance leaves open to demagoguery. The populist is often unconscious: whoever carries the flag of populism does not know for whom, the "rational", carries the flag. Beneduce was more consciously rational than the intuitive Mussolini; so were the Volpi, the Cini, etc.
In my political experience I have been used to this dialectic. Communism was an irrational utopia which by faith asked for accession to its political power in the name of a democratic centralism rationally managed by the party's oligarchy. Perhaps this explains the attachment to their traditional way of doing politics (around the fireplace) of what remains of the old grown up in democratic centralism. the utopia founded on arms rather than on economic development for the well-being of the population still supports Western populism; it does so with more likelihood of success, since it doesn't spend the bogeyman of communism.
