Edited by professors Nicola Lupo, Eduardo Gianfrancesco and Guido Rivosecchi, The Presidents of the Parliamentary Assembly is a collection of essays and reflections on the most important transformations of an institutional role that has been emblematic of many political trends and behaviors in the history of the Italian Republic.
Recent debates on the reform of the Senate and changes to the Constitution have brought attention to this figure, both an arbiter of the rules of parliamentary law and a leading player in the Italian political scene. We talked about this with Professor Nicola Lupo, professor of Law in Elective Assemblies at the Department of Political Science.
"The presidents of the House and Senate play a leading role in the political and institutional system: a role that has changed significantly, starting in the nineties with the so-called transition from the First to the Second Republic, which brought about a radical transformation in the party system." One of the most obvious proofs is that, starting in the 1994 elections, the presidents of the assembly descended more and more into the world of daily political struggle, both during and after their mandates. "It emerged very clearly in the case of the presidents of the House, always elected among the leading members of majority coalition parties. They then gradually exited the coalition, either shortly after (Casini), during (Bertinotti) or even before the end of their mandate (Fini). Specifically, the figure of President Fini seems to be a point of no return: the maximum possible political expansion of the figure of the President of the Assembly that has occurred so far.”
The Presidents of the Parliamentary Assembly, the fourth volume in a series of publications published by Il Mulino and edited by the Centre for Parliamentary Studies (CESP) at LUISS, where Lupo is the deputy director, also discusses the organization of the House and its relationships with other constitutional bodies. It underlines how, as the years have gone by, there has been a strategic interest on the part of the presidents of the Assembly, who have been able to keep the current rules unchanged. "In this way,” continues Lupo, “aside from having an external political role, the presidents of the Assembly have known how to exert a strong internal political role, availing themselves of the fact that the parliamentary law has remained largely unchanged since the seventies, while in the meantime the electoral system has shifted to become a first-past-the-post one."
This increase in power has an ever more decisive effect on the majority that determines voting outcomes and on the vote of confidence that keeps the government in power: "Aside from being the 'director' of parliamentary law, the president of the Assembly has decision-making powers with regard to procedure: it is he who is tasked with interpreting procedures and finding precedents through his offices. This has intensified the powers of the presidents of the Assembly, who have been able to play this internal card when it suits them, in their power struggles with the government or with the majority."
Faced with the current bill, which supports an indirectly elected Senate to overcome an equal two-chamber parliamentary system, Professor Lupo argues that it is a desirable change, all the more so given that "the failure to reform the two-chamber parliamentary system has up to now prevented action on the entire structure of the institutional system and on constitutional provisions regarding the form of government."
As for the intensification of the role of the presidents of the Assembly, "an initial response has already been given by the political system, electing Pietro Grasso and Laura Boldrini as presidents in the last term: two people who are new to Parliament and had never been in politics before that." Aside from this political weakening of the office,” which, according to the professor, "was a totally political response to the experience of President Fini," there needs to be more institutional reform in order to ensure that the many powers exercised by the two presidents are accompanied by conditions that uphold responsibility.