Any forcing is justified for “stability”, but democracy thrives on physiological discontinuity
The magic word used and abused in the funds of newspapers and in television talk shows was "stability", with regard to the election of the President of the Republic: invoked on the eve, in favor of Draghi, who would have guaranteed it by the Quirinale for seven years. sort of a de facto semi-presidentialism; and during the elective Assembly, in favor of Mattarella, sub specie of an uncontrollable avalanche of votes. Now it is necessary to agree on the meaning of the word, to verify whether and to what extent it is compatible with democracy, which obviously must not be harmed. Anyone who praises stability as the immutability of the ruling class takes for granted that this is certainly better ensured by dictatorship or autocracy, where personal perpetuation applies, which can also have the comfort of elections, but carried out with a single voice or even with a fraudulent count.
We begin to be put into suspicion in the presence of a Constitution that does not establish time limits on the duration of elective offices and any emergency regimes, in function and reason of sufficiently rigid formal procedures, as is a typical characteristic of the so-called Western one, which is the alone to deserve this qualification, daughter of which it has almost three thousand years of history, so that it cannot be exported in the best possible way. But the written paper is not enough for us, in this regard it is enough to recall the perfect constitutions of the socialist democracies, in fact completely enslaved to Moscow, yes having to recover with difficulty after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We want to see how it really works in everyday reality, according to the basic rule of democracy which, in order to be such, must be pluralist on a civil and political level, with the coexistence of several forces free to express themselves. If this is the case, democracy suffers from a physiological discontinuity, the foundations remain unchanged, but not so the plans built on them, subject to more or less incisive restructuring.
How does a democracy deal with a health and economic emergency situation, such as the one that traumatically marked the last three years, if there is no specific legislation in this regard in the fundamental charter? Both the duration and the nature of the coarctation of fundamental rights – starting with personal freedom, the basis of every civil coexistence – must be only those strictly required by the emergency situation, without cultivating a trawl policy, which violating that primal right at the same time violates all those that derive from it; duration and nature, which must be evaluated according to the golden formula of constitutional jurisprudence, reasonableness and proportionality.
Who should guarantee it? First, when issuing the measures, the Parliament and the President of the Republic, then, when applying, the ordinary and administrative judiciary and, if and to the extent called into question, the Constitutional Court; but it cannot be said that this was the case. Parliament, already delegitimized by a reform that reduced it by a third – plus the birth of Italia Viva , the liquefaction of the 5 Stars, the fragmentation of Forza Italia – was literally dominated by the survival instinct, swallowing the decrees first the Prime Minister, completely removed from his control, then the decree laws converted with a vote of confidence; the President of the Republic gave tacit assent, as if he were a stone guest; the judiciary, both ordinary and administrative, acted as a compañero, not accepting the constitutionality objections raised by the applicants against government measures, so as to keep out the judge of the laws.
The opinion shared by the mass media, with an unprecedented consonance between the "left" and "right" voices, was to pillory the parties for the fool made in the re-election of Mattarella, which certainly have their faults for not having reached an understanding, so as to have been denied and overwhelmed by the rising tide of parliamentarians, but not without extenuating circumstances. On closer inspection, Berlusconi's candidacy, shared by the entire center-right, was intentionally maintained until the evening before the start of the voting, although his impracticability was already clear, so as to prevent a negotiation from taking place before, the noble letter of The farewell written by him already seemed quite artificial at that time. What the man from Arcore wanted was to remain the director of the operation, quickly adapting to its evolution, with a promptness and vivacity that was not very compatible with his stay in hospital, Casellati, Casini, Mattarella. But it was the ambitions cultivated more or less concealed by Casini, Draghi and Mattarella himself, who ended up screwing up the elective Assembly, making a completely physiological duration dangerous for the survival of the legislature, I believe the only election. presidential without opposing candidacies.
It is a democracy in suffering if its stability is ensured by the re-election of a president of the Republic, so as to ensure him the office for the duration of 14 years, I believe not foreseen by any democratic constitution, because such as to involve that personalization characterizing dictatorships and autocracies, among other things, by an elective Assembly no longer in line with the constitutional amendment; and even more if this stability is also ensured by presidencies of the Council assigned to non-elected people, chosen in a hotel room by a yellow-green alliance with a numerical parliamentary majority but devoid of any political homogeneity (Conte), or imposed in saving function from the President of the Republic to an alliance so broad as to be unreliable, at least in the pre-election year (Draghi).
The cure would have been that typical of a democracy, that is, recourse to political elections, but it was not practiced by Mattarella, with the excuse of an emergency, but with the full awareness that the Democratic Party, to whom he owed his election, would be beaten. , so as to make his return to the Quirinale completely unlikely, an expectation cultivated with the cold patience of a Christian Democrat of yesteryear. Instead, what seems to re-emerge is a further revision of the electoral law, whose immutability, especially on the eve of a new consultation, represents, yes, a reason for the instability of a democracy, so much so that the longevity of this law characterizes its very vitality. Given the chaos of a Parliament that if it had been elected by a proportional law, it could not have been so fragmented; here are the centrists without voters, advocating a very pure one, with a minimum percentage of admissions, enough to survive, but not without the expectation of acquiring the decisive part of the pendulum. It was just them, but there is also the hope in the center-left of being able to defeat a winning center-right as a coalition, forcing it to fight separately in the three forces that compose it, adopting the technique of the last of the Horatii.
The post For “stability” any forcing is justified, but democracy thrives on physiological discontinuity appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/per-la-stabilita-giustificata-qualsiasi-forzatura-ma-la-democrazia-vive-di-fisiologica-discontinuita/ on Tue, 08 Feb 2022 03:52:00 +0000.