Here’s how the center-right broke up even on the referendum
The outcome of the referendums seen by Francesco Damato
Maybe the sinking of the referendum on justice in abstention could be liquidated, due to the lack of turnout of half plus one of the voters entitled to vote as an inevitable result of the "cynicism" and "messes" of the League. Carlo De Benedetti's old and new newspapers did it too: Tomorrow, expecting the result on Sunday and Repubblica commenting on it on Monday.
The League, in fact, had appeared from the very first moment as a curious ally of the radicals with a consolidated guarantee tradition – betrayed only in the 1978 campaign against Giovanni Leone at the Quirinale – in the promotion of abrogative questions and in the collection of signatures. To which, however, as if to diminish their importance or for fear that they might not be valid enough, the Northern League preferred last year, for filing with the Cassation, the abrogative requests formulated by the regions governed by a center-right not even compact in contesting the rules and laws targeted by the referendum initiative.
The right-wing of Gorgia Meloni, who by now contends for the leadership of the coalition to the League in relegation, is notoriously unwilling to contest the so-called Severino law, even though it cost the Senate seat to Cavaliere in 2013 for the definitive but contested sentence for tax fraud, and the rules on "pre-trial detention", ie on handcuffs, in the preliminary investigation phase.
Maybe, I said, we could liquidate the referendum shipwreck by attributing the blame to the Carroccio and to Salvini himself – I add – for too many reasons casually supported in recent months, including the unrealistic and confused travel plan to Moscow, complete with financial assistance from the Russian Embassy in Rome, to effectively overtake the Draghi government in its contacts with Putin. From which the war of aggression against Ukraine undeniably started according to evaluations shared in Parliament also by the League and used to participate in Western military aid in Kiev.
The referendums on justice have nothing to do with the pacifism warned and ridden by Salvini, but – I repeat – some repercussions on them cannot be excluded due to the reduced credibility of a leader who frankly finds it hard to pursue within of his own party, so dense are his agendas, to say the least.
The truth is that – fortunately for the more politicized judiciary interested in protecting its work habits and its prerogatives also from the popular repeal of the rules that protect them – referendums have now been killed in general by abstention. A referendicide took place on Sunday, by now. If Matteo Renzi also puts it in his head, he thinks he is practicing this path also against citizenship income, given the use that has been made of it.
That half plus one of the voters participating in the vote as a condition for the validity of the result of an abrogative referendum test was logical, natural more than 70 years ago, when it was put into the Constitution and the turnout in elections of all kinds, after more than twenty years of dictatorship, and even in the emotional conditions of popular mobilization in the postwar period, it was generally over 80 per cent, and even 90 per cent. we could say if the same politics had an almost religious conception, those percentages are simply a dream. And the same is true for the quorum of the abrogative referendums, which it is not by chance that a constitutional amendment has been planned – without being able, as usual, to bring it into line with the average turnout at the polls of the last political elections.
Until such a change is made, it will simply be useless to focus on abrogative referendums, despite the great services rendered by them in the divorce case, in 1974, or in the same field of justice in 1987, with a result on the civil liability of magistrates scandalously betrayed in a few months by the Chambers with a new law. It will be necessary to focus only on the reforming capacity of Parliament. But just thinking about it gives me hives, in the political confusion that I fear is beginning to frighten even one of the strength of nerves like Mario Draghi.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/referendum-centrodestra/ on Tue, 14 Jun 2022 05:16:50 +0000.