Italy's politics: why its governments keep falling

Why the constitution was written against concentrated power

The Italian Republic can be dated to a single ballot. On 2 June 1946 a referendum put the monarchy to the country, the republican side took 54% of the vote, and Umberto II was pressed into abdication. The same day, in the first national election in which Italian women voted, 556 members of a Constituent Assembly were chosen to draft a constitution.

That assembly was formed from the anti-fascist forces that had contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the liberation of Italy, and its composition explains most of what it produced. Its members had watched a parliamentary majority deliver the state to a dictatorship inside a decade. The text they promulgated, in force from 1 January 1948, reads as a set of obstacles placed in the way of any majority attempting the same thing again.

Article 1 declares Italy a democratic Republic founded on labour, states that sovereignty belongs to the people, and adds that the people exercise it "in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution". The final clause is the working part. Sovereignty moves only through prescribed forms and stops at stated limits, and the remainder of the document is those forms and those limits set out at length.

Beneath the constitution sits a hierarchy of legal sources in which no lower rule may conflict with a higher one, and the Constitution of 1948 is the highest of them. The Constitutional Court rules on whether laws conform to it. Justice is administered in the name of the people and judges answer only to the law, which makes the judiciary autonomous of the other two branches, although the Minister of Justice organises the services around it and may open disciplinary actions, which the High Council of the Judiciary then administers. Italian law descends from Roman law by way of the Napoleonic Code and later statutes; the appeal courts adopted an adversarial procedure in 1988, and three degrees of trial are available, the third of them a review of legitimacy. In November 2014 Italy accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

How perfect bicameralism actually works

Both houses of the Italian Parliament are elected every five years, and they perform identical functions separately. That is what a perfectly bicameral parliament means: each house holds the same powers as the other, so a law requires both of them and a government's confidence has to hold in both. Neither chamber revises the work of the other, and neither can be overruled by it.

The overseas seats are the unusual entry. Italian citizens living permanently abroad elect eight deputies and four senators in four distinct overseas constituencies, which keeps emigration inside the domestic electorate as a permanent bloc of votes. The Senate also seats a variable number of senators for life, appointed by the president for outstanding patriotic merits in the social, scientific, artistic or literary field, and former presidents hold such a seat as of right.

For most of the republic's life those two identical chambers were chosen by two different electorates. Until 2021 the minimum voting age was 18 for the Chamber and 25 for the Senate. Constitutional Law No. 1/2021 brought the Senate age down to 18, and the general election of 2022 was the first at which both chambers faced exactly the same voters.

Both have also been cut in size. The parliament elected in March 1994 held 630 deputies and 315 senators, against the 400 and 200 seated under the current arrangement. The symmetry between them survived the reduction untouched.

How governments form and how they fall

The president appoints the prime minister and, on the prime minister's proposal, the ministers who make up the cabinet. The government then has to win a vote of confidence in parliament, and has to go on winning them. Formally the office is President of the Council of Ministers, and the holder chairs that council, which exercises executive power and is composed of the ministers and the undersecretary to the president of the council. Deputy ministers and junior ministers belong to the government without sitting in the Council itself. The formal order of precedence places the office below the head of state and the presiding officers of the two chambers.

One power the office does not carry is dissolution: an Italian prime minister cannot dissolve parliament, which leaves the choice between a new government and a new election with the head of state. One power it holds alone is intelligence. Political responsibility for the services sits with the prime minister, who coordinates intelligence policy, determines its financial resources, strengthens cybersecurity, applies and protects state secrets, and authorises operations at home and abroad.

The arithmetic that follows from all this is blunt. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945 Italy has had 69 governments, an average of one every 1.11 years, and the reasons they end repeat. In December 1994 Silvio Berlusconi stepped down when the Northern League withdrew support, and a technical government under Lamberto Dini held office until early 1996. Romano Prodi lost a confidence vote by three votes in October 1998. Massimo D'Alema resigned in April 2000 after his coalition performed poorly in regional elections. Prodi, back in office, resigned on 21 February 2007, was asked by the president three days later to stay on, agreed, and narrowly survived a Senate no-confidence vote on 28 February; his cabinet fell in January 2008 when the Minister of Justice retracted his support and the president called a general election.

The pattern held into the 2010s and beyond. The 2018 election produced a hung parliament and an unlikely coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League under Giuseppe Conte; after fourteen months the League withdrew, and the Five Star Movement formed a second Conte cabinet with the Democratic Party and smaller left-wing parties. In February 2021 a national coalition under Mario Draghi, formerly president of the European Central Bank, took office after Italia Viva withdrew its support from the second Conte cabinet. On 21 July 2022 Draghi resigned in turn, three of his own supporting parties having withdrawn, parliament was dissolved, and the snap election that followed gave the centre-right coalition an absolute majority of seats. Italy's first female prime minister was sworn in on 22 October 2022.

Two of those cabinets attracted a constitutional objection worth recording. The governments led by Mario Monti from 2011 and Enrico Letta from 2013 were described by critics as unelected, because the confidence that sustained them came from a parliamentary coalition of centre-right and left parties that had contested the election against one another. Their formation complied with the law and with procedure; the objection was that it did not comply with the choice voters had expressed at the ballot.

What the president does when parliament deadlocks

The head of state serves a seven-year term and is chosen by an electoral college of at least 658 members, the exact size depending on how many senators for life are sitting. The college is both chambers meeting in joint session together with 58 special electors appointed by the regional councils of the 20 regions, three from each region except the Aosta Valley, which appoints one, so that localities and minorities are represented in the choice.

The office represents national unity and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the constitution. It is a point of connection between the three branches and carries considerably fewer powers than the King of Italy held before 1946. The president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, presides over the High Council of Defence, and chairs the High Council of the Judiciary, which places the head of state at the head of the body that disciplines judges without making the office part of the judiciary.

What the office does in practice is decide how a crisis ends. In May 1999 parliament elected Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a former prime minister, treasury minister and governor of the Bank of Italy, on the first ballot and by a comfortable margin over the required two-thirds. In February 2007 a president refused a resignation and sent a prime minister back to the chambers; in January 2008 a president accepted the fall of the same cabinet and called an election instead. In January 2022 the college re-elected the sitting head of state to a second consecutive seven-year term, a decision taken by the same parliament that had proved unable to agree on anybody else.

Why the party system collapsed and rebuilt itself

How the First Republic held together

From 1946 to 1994 the Christian Democrats dominated, and the dominant purpose of the arrangement was to keep the Italian Communist Party out of office and the Cold War balance in place. The communists sat in government only in the national unity cabinets before 1948, when their secretary Palmiro Togliatti was Minister of Justice. After the 1948 election, the first under universal suffrage, they never returned. Contemporaries called the result imperfect bipolarism, by contrast with systems in which a right and a left alternate in power.

In 1960 an attempt to bring the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement into the Tambroni cabinet produced riots that summer, and Fernando Tambroni was replaced as prime minister by Amintore Fanfani. The Italian Socialist Party entered government during the 1960s at the initiative of Aldo Moro, a left-leaning Christian Democrat who later tried to bring in the communists as well through what was called the historic compromise. That attempt ended in 1978, when the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered him.

Political violence framed the whole period. The Years of Lead opened on 12 December 1969 with the Piazza Fontana bombing in central Milan, which killed about twenty people and was first blamed on the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli; neofascist groups were later found responsible for a series of attacks. The bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980 was the last of them, and was found to be a neofascist operation involving the Propaganda Due lodge. On 24 October 1990 Giulio Andreotti disclosed to parliament the existence of Gladio, a NATO stay-behind network that stockpiled weapons against the possibility of a communist coup. A parliamentary commission reporting in 2000 from the centre-left Olive Tree coalition concluded that the strategy of tension around Gladio had been supported by the United States to keep the communists, and to some degree the socialists, out of executive power. That finding is the commission's own and is recorded here as such.

What the corruption trials swept away

The mani pulite investigations opened in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into the system of kickbacks known as Tangentopoli. Between 1992 and 1997 the inquiries touched thousands of politicians, administrators and businessmen, and the party system did not survive them. The Christian Democratic party dissolved, leaving the Italian People's Party and the Christian Democratic Center behind it. Socialist support fell away. The Communist Party renamed itself the Democratic Party of the Left and took over the social democratic ground the socialists had held. Forza Italia appeared as a new liberal movement, and the National Alliance broke away from the Italian Social Movement.

The scale of the turnover is legible in one figure. Of the parliament elected in March 1994, 452 of 630 deputies and 213 of 315 senators were sitting for the first time. What emerged from the wreckage was a rough bipolarity of two coalitions, visible from the April 1995 regional elections and formalised for the 1996 contest as the centre-left Olive Tree and the centre-right House of Freedoms, an alignment that carried into 2001 and 2007. It then stopped developing. Referendums intended to cut the influence of small parties further were defeated in 1999, 2000 and 2009, and the 2018 election produced a hung parliament again.

Why the electoral law keeps changing

Referendums in 1993 moved the country off proportional representation and onto the largely majoritarian scorporo system, which required 4% of the national vote for representation. In 2013 the Constitutional Court found that the law then in force breached several constitutional requirements, listing four faults: it deprived the elector of any margin of choice among representatives; every elected parliamentarian lacked a personal designation by citizens; its rules excluded any capacity for the elector to influence who was elected; and its conditions altered the relationship between electors and elected and coerced the freedom of vote guaranteed by Article 48. The Court held that the sitting parliament should remain in place only to reform the electoral system and should then be dissolved.

The replacement, the Italicum, was approved in 2015 and came into force on 1 July 2016. A constitutional referendum in December 2016 rejected the wider institutional reform attached to it, and the prime minister who had proposed that reform resigned. In 2017 the Italicum was itself replaced by a law assigning seats through parallel voting. Four electoral systems in a quarter of a century is a fair measure of how hard the underlying design is to satisfy.

What the constitution devolves and to whom

Italy is constituted of twenty regions, of which five hold special charters granting varying degrees of autonomy: the Aosta Valley, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily and Trentino-Alto Adige, also called Südtirol. In most cases the charter exists because of the linguistic and cultural minorities living in the region. In Sicily's case it was granted to quiet separatist movements. The other fifteen regions were put into practice in 1970, long after the idea for them had been formed. Below the regions sit the provinces and metropolitan cities, and below those the comuni that carry out most everyday administration. Regional councils also appoint the 58 special electors in the presidential college, which gives the regions a hand in choosing the head of state.

Devolution of a different kind runs through the tax return. Under the arrangement known as eight per thousand, the state passes a share of income tax to religious communities that have signed a concordat with it, and Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu communities may receive it. Islam is excluded from the scheme, because no Muslim community has signed a concordat. Taxpayers who prefer to fund no religion at all direct their share to the welfare system.

Where Italy stands among its allies

Italy was a founding member of NATO on 4 April 1949 and of the Council of Europe a month later, on 5 May 1949, and it signed the treaty that created the European Economic Community on 25 March 1957. Admission to the United Nations followed on 14 December 1955, the OECD on 29 March 1962, the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995 and the Schengen Area on 26 October 1997. The country joined the G7 grouping in 1977 and uses the euro. Its turns in rotating presidencies include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2018, the G7 in 2017 and the Council of the European Union in 2014, and it returns regularly as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.

The commitments are not only diplomatic. In 2013 Italy had 5,296 troops deployed abroad across 33 United Nations and NATO missions in 25 countries, including more than 2,000 in Afghanistan from 2003 and about 2,450 sent to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon in August 2006. A contingent of 3,200 troops in Iraq had been withdrawn by 2006. In 2013 alone the country contributed 60 million euros to the Palestinian Authority. Italy hosts United States B61 nuclear bombs at the Ghedi and Aviano air bases under NATO's nuclear sharing arrangement, military service has been voluntary since 2005, and Article 78 of the constitution reserves to parliament the power to declare a state of war and to vest war-making authority in the government.

One obligation arrives without being sought. The European migrant crisis of the 2010s made Italy a principal point of entry into the European Union across the Mediterranean, with arrivals concentrated from sub-Saharan Africa, and the political consequences reached the party system: public argument over immigration widened and support for populist parties rose.

How outside assessments describe Italian democracy

The Economist Intelligence Unit classified Italy as a flawed democracy in its 2024 Democracy Index, marking it down on political culture, where it scored 6.88 out of 10 points, while awarding it 9.58 for electoral process and pluralism. Political culture in that index measures popular support for democracy against support for military or expert rule.

Freedom House assessed Italy as free in 2024, with 89 points out of 100, citing competitive multiparty elections and the general granting of civil liberties. On press freedom it withheld a point, noting defamation suits against journalists that carry heavy financial costs for the defendant even where the case ends in acquittal, and it raised concerns about LGBT and migrant rights, regional inequalities, corruption and organised crime. The Global State of Democracy indices place Italy in the high range in every category except the rule of law, and cite as an example of that weakness the central government's reassignment of the judges responsible for migrant detention, which the opposition called retaliation. The Polity project has described Italy as a full democracy, at 10 out of 10, since 1948.

The shape of those assessments matches the shape of the constitution. What Italy is marked well on is the machinery of consent: elections, pluralism, participation through civil society and local government. What it is marked down on is what happens to power after consent has been given, which is exactly the stretch the Constituent Assembly left slow, divided and difficult to hold.