The institutional extremism of the Meloni Government. The revenge of the “marginalised”? ^*

Contents: 1. For a “genealogy” of the right-wing government’s institutional reforms – 2. In defiance of judicial pluralism, the reform of the High Council of the Judiciary (CSM) promoted by Almirante is approved – 3. Separating the judiciaries to crack the separation of powers – 4. At the top of the institutions, a leader elected directly by the people – 5. Abandoning parliament to its own fate – 6. A criminal law beyond “law and order” – 7. A nationalism tinged with nativism…

1. For a “genealogy” of the right-wing government’s institutional reforms

Thanks to the evidences of its “moderation” offered in the first half of its term, a large share of the public opinion – here also influenced by the well-orchestrated voices of the media - believes that Meloni’s government has refuted a considerable part of the worries and apocalyptic forecasts emerged on the eve of its inauguration. 

Some choices in the fields of economic policy and foreign affairs have surely contributed to consolidate this image of temperance and restraint now characterising the government. 

As far as economy is concerned, the option for an astute “orderly accounts” economic policy and the positive effect of the government’s stability on Italy’s rating and on spread have successfully masked the many negative indicators of the country’s economic situation: the continuous decrease of industrial production, the stagnation of salaries and productivity, the reality of poor work were therefore left in the background.

At the international level, the search for stability – in some cases, the Prime Minister’s political tightrope, actually – between the blatant cultural and ideological sympathies with Trump’s administration and the will not to lose touch – on the Ukraine crisis - with the European Union and its economic interests and strategic demands. 

This is a ground on which the Prime Minister, offering proof of persistent hypocrisy, steadfastly lectures on Atlanticism and loyalty to the Western World, as if these were still uniform and unifying concepts transcending the fractures and conspicuous discrepancies resulting from the choices of Donald Trump’s United States. 

The executive’s economic and foreign policy thus corroborate the image of a government in which the coalition’s majority party – though being the direct heir to the Italian post-fascists - appears to be by now fully a-fascist and working to implement a nationalist-conservative government policy. 

Such public image was only insignificantly touched by Giorgia Meloni’s statements following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which, forgetful of her role as all Italians’ Prime Minister, she did not hesitate to hold the Italian left wing accountable for imaginary current threats and exclusively responsible for the hatred, conflicts and victims of the “Years of Lead”.

However, a closer observation to the government’s institutional politics makes its measured, well-balanced and cautious public image fade away to make way for deliberate inflexibility and choices grounded on institutional and constitutional revanchism.

These are traits that jurists can see more clearly from their observation point than other scholars, and that come from a distant past. Not from the fascist one – which is not correct to evoke, as Brothers of Italy does not borrow any fascist[1] features from both an institutional and an economic point of view – but rather from the profoundly authoritarian cultural foundations of Giorgio Almirante’s Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI) of the 1970s and 1980s.

We here refer to the “marginalised” from the elaboration of the constitutional pact, who, though acting in the political context of democratic competition, have always perceived themselves as “estranged” from the values and the cultural and institutional balances enshrined in the Constitution and have patently opposed the Resistance and the political forces that cooperated to build a democratic republic in Italy.

And precisely because of this, the ISM was a political party that, though pursuing a low-calibre approach on transient political events, was firmly engaged in designing a New Republic, one radically different and opposed to the one born from the Constitution. 

As a matter of fact, going through the genealogy of the constitutional reforms and the policy of law pursued by the incumbent right-wing government allows to clearly identify– and with specific reference to Brothers of Italy - the legacy of the past, the elements of an intentional continuity with the ideas and institutional proposals expressed by the right-wing forces of the First Republic as well as the very same resentment against some of the most specific features of our Constitution.

This institutional and constitutional extremism – which refutes the opinions on the moderation of the incumbent government and raises deep concerns on the future hold of the democratic framework – is all the more disquieting as it expresses the will of the “marginalised pole” to take revenge on the Constitution and the institutional history of the Republic and to overturn the founding rules and principles of Italy’s republican democracy. 

To show the actual existence and the radicalism of this revanche spirit, we need to focus, albeit briefly, on the genealogy of the current right wing’s constitutional reforms and on the historical sources of its political inspiration. 

We must warn that a case-by-case analysis of individual pieces of legislation or bill does not allow to perceive the real scope and impact, as only a comprehensive understanding of the whole picture can convey the actual extent and impact of the current policies. 

2. In defiance of judicial pluralism, the reform of the High Council of the Judiciary promoted by Almirante is approved

The first, so to say, “genealogical” feature of the extremist and revanchist institutional policy of Meloni’s government lays in the will to reshape – by profoundly overturning it – the judiciary’s self-government system, entrusting its composition to the “draw” of the tenured members of two separate high councils of judges and prosecutors as well as of the High Court of Discipline as the newly-created judge for the members of the judiciary.

The proposed introduction of a random selection system aims at returning the Italian judiciary to its original status of ideologically homogeneous body, held together by basic material and professional interests only. 

Such outcome is intentionally pursued by preventing – through random selection –the self-governing bodies of the judiciary and the public prosecution from being the expression and, as the direct consequence of elections, the mirror of the different visions of jurisdiction and the plurality of institutional cultures expressed by the various judicial associations operating within the Italian Associazione Nazionale Magistrati (ANM). 

With a tone of propaganda and against historical truth, those groups are represented as a negative entity that must be erased in order to set the Italian judiciary free from their patronage and perilous influence. 

Questione giustizia has already published several analytical articles about the nature and the history of the “draw” option, and to these articles we here refer[2]. 

However, we would like to highlight another aspect relevant to the “draw”, unknown to many and almost never mentioned when debating the constitutional reform of the judiciary. 

We refer to the paternity of the proposal concerning the random selection of the members of the HCJ, which belongs to Giorgio Almirante as the first to put it forth in the history of the Republic, and organically and coherently fits into the project of a “New Republic” nurtured by the Italian Social Movement and his leader since the 1970s.

The accompanying report to the bill proposed by Almirante and other MPs and concerning «Amendments to arts. 104, 105, 107 of the Constitution on the judicial function» (C.3568 of 23 July 1971) stated that art. 101 Const. enshrining that judges are only subject to the law «was violated through the so-called “evolutionary interpretation”» and that «under the actual circumstances […] multiple internal divisions, factions, and organisations were born that have become irreplaceable instruments essential to run in the elections to the highest body»[3]. 

According to Almirante and his associates, the ideal and, so to say, ultimate solution to stop the degeneration of judicial factionalism was prohibiting judges and prosecutors from becoming not only members to political parties but also to «professional associations», as envisaged in bill no. 2234 of 22 January 1970 introduced to the Chamber of the Deputies by ISM MPs Romeo and Manco[4]. 

While waiting for this much-anticipated prohibition – the report to the bill read - «it is appropriate to introduce non-elected High Council of the Judiciary members […] and, to this end, drawing them from selected categories of judges and prosecutors appears to be the most suitable solution», as it would have ensured a higher degree of independence of the drawn members and a lesser degree of politicisation of judiciary’s self-governing body. 

According to Almirante and the other ISM MPs, the High Council of the Judiciary also needed to be stripped of its disciplinary functions, which had to be handed over to the civil Joint Sections of the Court of Cassation. 

So, «the same things recur», although with a few variations and in a different context. 

The same ideas are proposed again; the same projects are tenaciously brought back to life to achieve those goals that were missed in the past. 

Work is getting done to demolish the ideal and cultural pluralism of the Italian judiciary – an extraordinary factor for the growth of all the members of the judiciary – and favour regression to a corporative mindset where “one is good as another”. 

Support is given to returning to a judiciary made of “civil servants” whose independence is less protected by a weaker, less legitimised and authoritative self-governing body born out of a random selection rather than elected. 

This approach aims at erasing the history of the judiciary as it has unfolded since the ANM congress in Gardone, where the question posed by Giuseppe Maranini «judges or civil servants?» was answered with the proud and self-aware refusal of the “judge-bureaucrat” model. 

It is honestly disturbing to witness this ideal and programmatic continuity between Giorgio Almirante and Giorgia Meloni, the ISM of the ‘70s and ‘80s and today’s right wing, the New Republic project and the constitutional reform of the judiciary and its crucial point, i.e., not the separation between the judiciary and the public prosecution, but – as many now acknowledge - the rejection of elections and of the democratic process for forming the judiciary’s governing bodies.  

The will to eradicate the «weed of factions» - once again declared by Giorgia Meloni at Communion and Liberation’s meeting in Rimini – does not stem only from the intentional ignorance of the judiciary’s own history and from the positive cultural and ideal function judicial associations have played. It is also rooted in the strenuous determination to turn judges and prosecutors into isolated bureaucrats, held together by the broad glue of corporative interests – a will that pertained to the Italian post-fascists. 

In line with the vision of Almirante’s heirs, this option collides with the declared liberalism, protection of civil liberties and with the professed intention to defend the independence of those in favour of the constitutional reform. 

Along this line, in order to promote the constitutional reform of the judiciary, the Ministry of Justice keeps evoking Giuliano Vassalli, but sells a product that will ultimately vilify the self-government of the judiciary, conceived by the post-fascist right-wing as opposed to the text and the spirit of the republican constitution from whose drafting process was excluded. 

A similar condition is experienced by the Criminal Bar Association and other associations of attorney-at-laws who support Meloni’s government’s project without recalling its origins and intentionally failing to grasp its belittling vision of judicial independence as a whole. 

Not to speak of a small group of members of the judiciary – the “101” – to whom the right-wing press offers an extremely powerful megaphone each time one of them demonstrates the virtues of random selection, presuming that the weakening of the judiciary’s self-government mechanisms would leave untouched the legal and economic judicial safeguards currently enjoyed by the judiciary.

3. Dividing the “judiciaries” to undermine the separation of powers

The option in favour of a random selection mechanism for the composition of two separate High Councils and the creation of a separate High Court of Discipline casts upon the separation of judicial careers an importance that transcends the mere differentiation between the professional tracks of judges and prosecutors. 

The aim of the reform is to achieve an actual “genetic mutation” of the judicial order. This will affect a broad range of institutional spheres: judicial “careers” and “government”, the whole “judicial organisation”, “judicial associations” as well as the “disciplinary jurisdiction”. 

Hence the radical tone of the clash between those in favour and those against the reform, as they contend not only upon the contents of the constitutional reform bill, but also upon the institutional processes that will be triggered by the new constitutional structure of the judiciary. 

Against this backdrop, the harshest and most controversial theme is the future of public prosecution and its independence. 

Although the constitutional reform bill does not affect the independence of the public prosecution service from the executive branch, it is fair to assume that the fate of public prosecutors will be immediately at the heart of renewed deep tensions once the reform is approved. 

Governed by a body of constitutional significance, the public prosecution service will be an unprecedented independent prosecution State power with no equivalent in any other liberal democracy, which might trigger constitutional imbalances and reactions aimed at limiting its scope and agency. 

When it comes to the future perspectives of the public prosecution service, the reform’s supporters are in facts openly divided. 

Some spread vaguely reassuring messages on its future independence, while the others, as Senator Marcello Pera, are already invoking «a criminal policy univocally determined by an apex body» as opposed to the chaos where «each public prosecutor, if not each public prosecution office, is free to prosecute the crimes and pursue the criminal policy they prefer»[5]. 

Only by closing one’s eyes to reality can one fail to see that, on the thorny and controversial cases that are always present in jurisdiction, campaigns of aggression and discredit may be mounted against the separate and “unaccountable” body of the public prosecution service aiming at bringing them back withing the sphere of responsibility of the executive branch. 

The insults and violent attacks against public prosecutors – often carried out in cold blood and without any specific casus belli – reveal how intolerable the independence of the public prosecution service is to the right-wing, as a structure they want to bring back to obedience at all costs, in order for the political majority power to obtain and manage the leverage of prosecution in a spirit of partisanship. 

This result can be obtained also via an ordinary piece of legislation stripping the public prosecution service of its independent power to identify criminal offence reports and turning it into a “police attorney” that only acts following the police reports and exclusively with the aim of supporting police initiatives in court. 

Undermined by political and institutional processes triggered by the constitutional reform of the judiciary, the separation of powers is here at stake. 

4. At the top of the institutions, a leader elected directly by the people

Another openly claimed element of continuity between the Italian Social Movement’s culture and institutional proposals and Meloni’s government is the concentration of government powers in the hands of a leader directly elected by the people. 

In 1983, hosted by Enzo Biagi in his tv show Repubblica: Atto II, Giorgio Almirante claimed the need to free the government from the «servitude of partocracy», so that «the Prime Minister is not extracted by the forceps of partocracy but is appointed directly» by a Head of State whose strength also comes from being directly invested by the people and not from being subordinate to the party system. 

In 2018, at the beginning of the XVIII legislature, Giorgia Meloni and other MPs introduced a bill (AC n. 716) to amend Part II of the Constitution concerning the direct election of the President of the Republic.

After recalling the authoritative Italian cultural and political personalities that had supported presidentialism though with different nuances - Gaetano Salvemini, Pietro Calamandrei, Randolfo Pacciardi, Leo Valiani, Giuseppe Saragat, Giuseppe Maranini, Giorgio La Pira - the accompanying report to the bill maintained, among other things, that «a President directly elected by the Italians and accountable to his constituency represents the most important constitutional reform we could present to a nation that demands stability but also needs to transition from a “debating” to a “deciding” democracy».

From her presidentialism-oriented stances, the Prime Minister quickly converted to premiership during its term in office, taking care of keeping the focus on the key political target represented by the direct popular election of a broadly-empowered head of the executive and the reduction of the role of political parties and parliament as its natural corollaries. 

This extremism related to the direct election of the head of the executive – which Giorgia Meloni has often restated personally – is exactly what reveals the core, the substantive political will that lays at the heart of the constitutional reform project.  

They want to introduce into the framework of our parliamentary democracy an element of potentially plebiscitarian and charismatic personalism – therefore set to be unlimited and unhampered by any checks and balances – capable of paving the way to an unprecedented concentration and occupation of power and to so far unthinkable perspectives, which would disrupt and alter institutional relations and balances between State bodies and powers. 

The origins of this choice lie in the oldest and deepest roots of the Italian right-wing as well as in in a top-down understanding of power nurtured by the myth of the “leader” operating in a symbiotic way with the people. This is exactly what differentiates the right-wing approach from the other forms of democratic presidentialism proposed in the past by the representatives of various political sides. 

The full implementation of this ancestral idea clearly needed a preparatory work of constitutional engineering that sketched the lines of a new organisation of power capable of ensuring the undisputed mid-term pre-eminence of the new political hendiadys created by the reform: a Prime Minister – directly elected by the people – and their parliamentary majority. 

Constitutional amendment bill AS. No. 953 achieves this goal by bringing together a seemingly modest, almost minimalist intervention on the constitutional provisions and a stunning alteration of the constitutional framework. The constitutional bill outlines a “catch-all Prime Minister” who can both decide the government’s political agenda and influence the election of the President of the Republic and Constitutional Court judges thanks to the strength that derives from being directly elected by the people and the control exercised over the parliamentary majority. 

5. Abandoning Parliament to its own fate

Against this backdrop – closely connected and heavily influenced by the Prime Minister – Parliament loses any residual claim for a key role and becomes subordinate and servant to the institutional bloc represented by the Prime Minister and their majority. 

In any case, electoral laws and the consolidated political customs of the last decade have already taken the belittlement of the political weight of parliamentary assemblies and the deterioration of their role to an extremely advanced stage. 

On the one side, since 2005, the sequence of electoral laws[6] has generated and kept alive a “parliament of appointees”, and transformed the majority of MPs into civil servants owing their election to the position the establishment of their party assigned to them within the electoral roll. 

On the other side, the consolidated custom of governing by decree laws – on grounds of an allegedly ongoing situation of “need and urgency” that no one even pretends to believe in anymore for fear of making a fool of themselves – has turned Parliament into a rubber-stamp body for the government’s decisions. 

It is worth mentioning that, although a right-wing government had originally introduced the law that initiated such “parliament of appointees”, attributing full control upon the MPs election to the parties’ establishment appeared an appealing option to left-wing and centre parties, too. 

In this light, no political force nor government coalition has seriously committed to change an electoral system that deprives individual MPs of an autonomous representative capacity and of the full legitimacy stemming from the electorate’s choices. 

Equally, governments of any political orientation have systematically resorted to decree laws that relegated ordinary and parliamentary initiative legislation to the background. 

The «mother of all reforms» promoted by the right wing does not care about the clearly visible flaws of our institutional system; much to the contrary, it makes them worse by opposing the strong legitimacy of the head of the executive branch to the halved one of the “appointed” MPs and by subjugating the parliamentary majority to the Prime Minister. 

This intentional depreciation of the role of Parliament echoes the ISM’s right-wing culture.

As a protest against partocracy and with the specific aim of downsizing the role of parliamentary assemblies, in the 1970s and 1980s the post-fascist right-wing used to propose that Parliament ought to be composed half of politicians elected by the people and half of representatives elected by professional associations. Today, the heirs to that tradition may achieve their goals just by supporting the ongoing processes of marginalisation of the Chambers and making the parliamentary majority the submissive instrument in the hands of a Prime Minister directly elected by the people. 

In any case, the reported degradation of Parliament has now come to the point where the proposed constitutional reform has been approved exactly as drafted by Meloni and Nordio without any modifications whatsoever. 

Majority deputies and senators revere the vision of the incumbent executive with such total devotion that right-wing representatives abstained from amending, correcting, improving the text in any possible way, which made that very text impenetrable to any opposition amendments. 

As a consequence, the Constitution is being amended without any parliamentary participation to the drafting of the new provisions nor any autonomous contribution from Parliament in terms of deliberation or experience. 

6. A criminal law beyond “law and order”

As all could easily see, in the first part of its term, Meloni’s government chose to use criminal law as the key tool to govern unrest and social conflict and give “its own” answer to the citizens’ demand for security. 

This choice entailed an unprecedented activism in the repeated introduction of increased criminal sanctions, new crimes, new aggravating circumstances through a series of decree-laws continuously issued in the name of emergency. 

However, this was not the typical re-edition of a more generalised right-wing government “law and order” policy, but a more sophisticated operation that flexibly used criminal law to send different messages to specific sectors of the population, to professional groups as well as to parts of the institutions. 

Through the decriminalisation of abuse of office, the revision of the offence of influence peddling, and the proliferation of crimes targeting social marginality and protest, the government has drawn the first and fundamental dividing line in its criminal policy initiative.

We are here facing a sharp divide between the permissive approach towards the unlawful, abusive and illicit behaviours of those in power and an extremely – violently in some cases - strict stance towards social marginality, petty crimes and all manifestations of political and social actions that exceed the boundaries of the most stringent formal legality. 

Therefore, on the one side, as Alessandra Algostino wrote, we are facing «a special law of the friend, articulated in a classist and authoritarian way» that decriminalises white-collar crimes and introduces privileged protection for police forces, thus conveying «the image of the State as authority»[7]. 

On the other hand, a special law of the enemy, that criminalises dissent and social unrest and points at the foreigner as the «quintessential enemy»[8].

These “special laws” are both light years away from the Constitution and bring along a extensive series of institutional changes: «from conflictual democracy to the authoritarian State; from welfare state to criminal state; from security as the safeguard for fundamental rights to security as public order; from empowerment to criminalisation; from inclusion to expulsion; from effective participation to obedience to authority; from the open horizon of pluralism to the identitarian and exclusionary logic of the enemy»[9].

The theme of the right-wing’s criminal law being fundamentally at odds with the Constitution reappears — with a strikingly similar tone — in the analyses of both constitutional and criminal law scholars.

Against this backdrop, Marco Pelissero identifies the main traits of Meloni’s government’s criminal law reform as the use of criminal law as both a symbol and a deterrent; the shift from a criminal law of facts to one “of the offender”; and a concept of legality disconnected from the Constitution[10].

Along this line, Gaetano Azzariti sees in the security-related provisions «the final act in chronological order of an all-encompassing political and cultural project aimed at relinquishing the principles of our constitutional system in order to embrace different ones belonging to the history of the incumbent right-wing government […] and to favour the supremacy of individual egoism and ideal public order representing the core of the authoritarian mentality[11]. 

If authoritarianism and stark contrast with the Constitution are the core traits of the government’s criminal law policy, the dramatically increased use of criminal law in the past three years aims at answering more day-to-day political demands and serves the purpose of reinforcing the existing connections with specific institutional and social sectors. 

In this vein lies the blatant attempt to make the police forces (as well as the armed forces and the fire brigade) loyal and politicised through the enhancement of their powers and the introduction of special protective rules and specific privileges[12].

This went so far that in the statements of many right-wing representatives, the “security decree” primarily and overtly aims at ensuring the «security of security institutions» in the first place, rather than that of citizens. 

Those who hold the monopoly on the use of force are tendentiously encouraged to see in the right-wing their true and only protectors against a political opposition which is systematically considered on the same side as violent opponents, agitators and street criminals, as well as aligned to a judiciary insensitive to the practical problems, difficulties and risks encountered by the police forces and ready to indict them on grounds of marginal violations. 

We can also see a “corporatist drift” of criminal law as implemented to answer the demand for protection expressed by specific categories of professionals exposed to violence and harassment, such as healthcare workers and the aforementioned police forces. 

Finally, and more in general, criminal law is conceived as an instrument to ease a wide range of actual or alleged social worries and fears, ranging from the unlawful occupation of houses to elder frauds, from the spread of drug use to traffic obstructions and congestion. 

However, whether such complex legal arsenal – as designed by the executive and ratified by Parliament – truly enhances citizens’ protection has yet to be verified in practice. 

However, as the government’s action is clearly flawed, doubts emerge. 

In facts, security is reductively conceived in terms of public order, while introducing new types of criminal offences, increasing criminal sanctions and lowering the threshold of criminal liability are the almost sole deterrents to these specific attacks to security. All this is not complemented by any policies aimed at increasing the number and improving the training of police forces nor by the commitment to safe, well-lit streets, as invoked by Cesare Beccaria, which could be easily implemented today thanks to advanced public and private space control and surveillance techniques. 

The conceptual legal proclaims and the “new redemptive measures” propaganda – that exhaust all the government’s efforts – do not appear sufficient to ensure a higher degree of security, while they surely dilute criminal law, by depriving it of any internal consistency and coherence, and by degrading it with excessively repressive and often completely irrational choices. 

7. A nationalism tinged with nativism…

One last aspect which it is worth to pay attention to is the Prime Minister’s constant reference to the idea of nation and its constitutive elements, i.e. the identity of ethnicity, language, culture and customs. 

In one word, reference to “nationalism” declined in the forms and fashion that is deemed more in line with the Italians’ current aspirations as well as specific worries and concerns. 

It is interesting to notice that – when crossing paths with a hot topic such as immigration – the nationalist ideology, highly relevant in Brothers of Italy’s genetic heritage as the direct heir of the Italian Social Movement, has progressively acquired many of the distinctive features of “nativism”[13]. 

We are here dealing with an ideology that attributes an undoubted pre-eminence to “nation” as the set of members of a native group and considers «non-native elements (both people and ideas) […] as an intrinsic threat to the homogeneity of the Nation State[14]» 

Therefore, it is an illiberal form of nationalism, that «includes or excludes from being part of the national community (that community that deserves to be represented and protected) not on grounds of a legal status such as citizenship, but rather on features such as ethnicity, race or religion; or that subordinates the acquisition of citizenship to featuring those very characters[15]».

The flamboyant and impracticable promises of solving the problem of illegal immigration through an unrealistic naval blockade have immediately proved themselves an “electoral campaign serenade” for the gullible and have been rapidly dismissed and forgotten. However, the muddy depths of a nationalism tinged with nativism remained there to hamper a well-structured immigration policy and to suggest dully strict solutions characterised by prejudiced refusal and hostility. 

Tackling the issue of immigration beyond a prejudiced ideological framework means putting the understandable attempt to regulate and contain migratory influxes according to the international and EU law together with language teaching, vocational training and employment policies targeting migrants already residing in the country.

Such choice would prevent those people from falling prey to social exclusion and organised crime. 

What is now prevailing is an illiberal nationalism, on the one hand, opposes to referendums aiming at reducing the years of residence in the country required to obtain citizenship, and, on the other hand, also opposes to the so-called ius scholae, i.e. to connecting the acquisition of citizenship to the attainment of a certain degree of education. 

In this new right-wing approach, immigration and the desire for the “remigration” of immigrants residing in the country are the key issues in which nationalism and populism merge to produce policies typical of a dogmatic and intolerant nationalism. Along this line, violent reactions follow against those judicial decisions that contradict this stance by necessarily applying mandatory international law principles and EU regulations. 

As already seen with regards to constitutional reforms and criminal law, in this field, too, the veiled moderation of Meloni’s government appears to be a smoke curtain bound to quickly dissolve to reveal the nationalist and nativist core of the government’s policy. 

By drawing inspiration from the ISM’s right-wing political culture, Meloni’s government is actively pushing the country’s institutional framework on an illiberal and authoritarian path. 

Against this backdrop, the acceptance of the democratic method lives together with the hostility against some of the key features of liberal democracy – respect for strict separation of powers, protection of the rights of minorities and of the rule of law – and aims at downsizing the role of Parliament in favour of the centralisation of powers in the hands of the government and the Prime Minister.  

 
[1] On the a-fascist nature of Brothers of Italy, see S. Vassallo, R. Vignati, Fratelli di Giorgia, Il partito della destra nazional conservatrice, Bologne, Il Mulino, 2023. On the events relating to the Italian right wing and the transformations its political parties have gone through, see M. Tarchi, Le tre età della fiamma: la destra in Italia da Giorgio Almirante a Giorgi Meloni, Milan, Solferino, 2024.

[2] On this subject, see: R. Romboli, Magistratura e politica dalla finestra del Csm. I progetti di revisione costituzionale e la pratica di delegittimazione della magistratura, in Questione giustizia on line, 11.6.2025, now in Questione Giustizia, quarterly edition, no. 1-2/2025, La riforma costituzionale della magistratura; N. Rossi, CSM separati e formati per sorteggio. Una riforma per scompaginare il governo autonomo, in Questione giustizia on line 10.6.2025, now in Questione Giustizia, quarterly edition, no. 1-2/2025, La riforma costituzionale della magistratura, and the bibliography therein available.

[3] The accompanying report to the bill also stated that «the grave factionalism-related deformations of the various electoral systems applied in time to the judicial self-governing body can be overcome only through a radical reform: resorting to the draw among the candidates belonging to the judiciary». Similar reasons pinpointed two other constitutional reform bills: one concerning the «Reform of Title IV, Part II of the Constitution (C. 4275 of 7 April 2011) and one proposing «Amendments to art. 104 of the Constitution for the election by draw of the members of the High Council of the Judiciary» (S. 1547 of 30 June 2014) introduced by Senator Buemi and others.

[4] The accompanying report to the bill read that «[…] judges do not need any associations for the purposes of their own defence, as they are subject to self-government» and maintained the suitability of a «piece of legislation envisaging, for the members of the judiciary, the prohibition of membership to political parties and even to professional associations, which, we must admit, ended up adopting political inspirations».

[5] See Senator Marcello Pera’s declarations as reported by Valentina Stella, E Pera svegliò l’aula «Non mi fido di procure che vanno a simpatie», in Il Dubbio, 10.7.2025.

[6] We hereby refer to law 21 December 2005, no. 270 «Amendments to the provisions for the election of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic », also known as Porcellum in the press jargon.

[7] A. Algostino, I diritti speciali dell’amico e del nemico: un diritto penale contro la Costituzione, in Questione giustizia on line, 8.4.2025, p. 9, now in Questione giustizia, quarterly edition, no. 3/2025.

[8] A. Algostino, ibid., pp. 8-9.

[9] A. Algostino, ibid., p. 1.

[10] M. Pelissero, La tutela penale della sicurezza pubblica. Una costante ossessione, in Questione giustizia on line, 16.7.2025, pp. 4 ff., now in Questione giustizia, quarterly edition, no. 3/2025.

[11] G. Azzariti, Democrazia e sicurezza, in Questione giustizia on line, 9.4.2025, p. 1, now in Questione giustizia, quarterly edition, no. 3/2025.

[12] In Decree-Law No. 48 of 11 April 2025 – the so-called “Security Decree” – containing urgent provisions on public security, the protection of on-duty personnel, as well as on victims of usury and the prison system (converted into Law No. 80 of 9 June 2025):
a) legal protection is provided for members of the police forces, the National Fire Brigade, and the armed forces who are under investigation or on trial for acts connected with their service activities (the State may pay up to €10,000 for legal expenses at each stage of the proceedings; the decision concerning the establishment of the employee’s liability on grounds of intent can be challenged, whereas this possibility is excluded in cases of dismissal, limitation of action, filing, or other acquittal, except where, for the facts contested in criminal proceedings, the employee’s liability for gross negligence has been established in disciplinary proceedings);
b) an aggravating circumstance is introduced for the offences of violence, threat, or resistance against a public official when the act is committed against an officer or agent of the judicial police or public security, with an increase in the penalty of up to one-half (instead of one-third);
c) officers are also authorised to carry private weapons without a license when off duty.

[13] Interestingly enough, nativism was not a distinguishing feature of Alleanza nazionale, defined as a «partito conservatore in cui né il nativismo né il populismo sono preminenti » according to C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 56.

[14] C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe [...], p. 19.

[15] C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe […], ibid.