The first advantage of the reform subject to referendum consists in limiting itself to a single point (reducing the number of those elected). An essential and clear point. Which is not a header or a forcing of the rules. In forty years – having taken into account that in the meantime the regions had arrived with their numerous advisers and European parliamentarians – the chambers have voted this principle 13 times (say 13) without ever succeeding in realizing it, because it was covered up in the faceless swamps created from material corporate interests.
In these forty years, the functioning of the Chambers has undoubtedly given evidence of increasing redundancy and inefficiency. Even if manipulated things are said in this regard, the indisputable reality is that today Italian voters elect more parliamentarians than any other country except Spain. Today there is one member of parliament elected for every 63,900 inhabitants; tomorrow there will be one every 100,666 (more than in Germany, 1 every 116,220; which in practice is like France; in the United Kingdom 1 every 102,769). It must be said that it is an Italian democratic scandal that the parliamentary offices disseminate data that do not correspond to the truth.
The current referendum is therefore the right time to acknowledge that no other parliament is as plethoric as the Italian one. And that reducing the number of elected officials improves the functionality of the proceedings and decisions in the Chamber, makes them more understandable to citizens who observe from the outside and finally leads to an electoral debate that is much more attentive to ideas and consequent projects than the usual diatribes of candies. After all, Einaudi had already told the Constituent Assembly. In short, reducing the number of elected representatives greatly strengthens the quality of representation.
This is already making the Italians decide the number of those elected before anything else, and a useful symbol of principle to then add to this reform the others that will be deemed necessary (such as the new electoral law, parliamentary regulations). But it must remain clear that the subsequent reforms are of a different kind than the cut in the number of elected officials. And other evaluations will follow to be carefully weighed. Three examples. Rushing to eliminate the differences between the Senate and the Chamber collides with the aim of eradicating the Italian equal bicameralism, the source of a series of disservices. Or reducing the number of delegates of the Regions for the election of the President of the Republic contradicts the need to strengthen his role as representative of the “national unity”, which would advise an increase in the number of voters.
These three examples reaffirm how to expect a constitutional reform completed in detail at the outset would have prevented even this time from reducing the number of elected officials. We would have remained in the cradle of the illusions that all is well and that Parliament is working great, while in truth the institutions are sinking into the mud and fog. Statistical data prove this even before civil perception.
Moreover, reducing the number of those elected entails further advantages beyond that of parliamentary functioning and the quality of the political confrontation to elect it. The fewer people invested in the representative role, the more the political weight of the elected individual grows, which will really count because it is the result of a harder and more difficult selection. Weight that is also the political rebalancing between the parliamentarian in office and the party that nominated him, now having a restricted area of ​​seats (which decreases clientelist traffic). Hand in hand with the reduction – given that the citizens’ representatives must be adequately paid as holders of an absolutely important task in living together – the number of people required to make politics a job at the expense of the public treasury will decrease.
Overall, a reform with a modest impact which, however, reassures citizens about the Parliament’s ability to adjust itself over time. On this point, indeed, there is an abysmal contradiction in the supporters of the no. They say they are worried about the disfigurement that would be done to Parliament, and then they wanted this referendum – obtained with constitutionally very audacious legal passages – which, if the no wins, would really rub what was decided in Parliament with a large majority (in the last vote in the Room, around 90%).
Moreover, the natural civil dynamism of the vision included in the vote is proven by the unequivocal identity of the core of those who vote no. On the one hand, it is made up of almost all the old DCs in the registry office. The top leaders of the DC at the time, those still alive today, vote no. True to themselves, they find themselves repulsed by change, especially when others change (horror). They repeat the same mentality according to which the DC has finally disappeared.
On the other hand, there is a similar situation also in the Marxist field. Here too, all the best-known ideological leaders hold out for the no, guilty of not following the rules of tradition, especially that fruit of the convergence of the historical compromise on the idea that the Constitution of ’48 is in fact intangible. The reason for convergence and why allowing it would grant a dangerous autonomy to the forces that make the citizen choose, regardless of the indications of the mass parties. This convergence of the two nuclei of what was once called the historical compromise, has found a sounding board in most of the printed media, hostile to the diversity and change that wear down its privileged relationships, already reduced in recent months. It is surreal that a great newspaper, completely overturns the reality of the facts and argues that the grouping of the no represents a changing country. In fact, data in hand, and the exact opposite.
The no does not hide the fact that institutions are considered a monument to be preserved in its static forms and traditional power relations. Because immobility keeps citizenship tied to the line of having to be pre-established by the conformism of the democratic tradition. The yes, contrary to the tale told Tuesday in the newspaper, is not the mere tail of the populist season, precisely because without uncertainty it wants the best functioning of the institutions. And so it keeps populism at bay. Institutions are not a static monument. Their value lies in their functioning. That is, in being able to provide citizens with the services that are indispensable for achieving civil daily coexistence. Therefore the real crux of the institutions is their effective functionality.
This is the political and cultural core of the referendum. The static conservatism of the no (for which nothing must be changed beyond the gossip, accompanied by the utopian visions that have never followed), against the dynamic effort of the yes to trigger concrete changes little by little, with the aim of making the mechanism works better. Because the representative mechanism only by renewing itself periodically maintains the public participation function of citizens in dog and bone, which is the greatest novelty found in the last 4 centuries.
These are the daily verifiable facts. Unfortunately in Italy the public narrative is today dominated by giving manipulated news that feeds on social networks. Thus, for example, the choice of the leadership of the Democratic Party made 185 to 13, was presented as a success of the 13 and almost nothing was said about the ability of the Democratic Party to confirm the indication of the vote in favor of the given one year does. He confirms that instead it is a consistency to be recognized objectively, because such behavior is useful for discussing ideas, stopping using the slogans of the power debate, exasperated by manipulated and self-fueled news on social media.
This time, voting is a small but concrete step to give citizens a corrective that enhances the representative instrument.
