What is the premiership, the direct election of the head of government, and the comparison with foreign models – Corriere.it

It’s easy to say premiership. This could be the card to play at the reform table Giorgia Meloni as an alternative to presidentialism (which provides for the direct election of the President of the Republic and is the workhorse of the centre-right in the electoral campaign). For the Deputy Prime Minister of FI Antonio Tajani, the premiership could be the most welcome solution for the majority of the forces present in Parliament. But if the premiership is more appreciated, even by the opposition, precisely because this model, which assigns greater centrality and more powers to the head of government, can be declined in various ways. Let’s see some of them.

Direct election of the premier

What shape does the center-right have in mind? The majority seems willing to renounce the direct election of the President of the Republic, but are asking in exchange the direct election of the head of government: serves a premier chosen, and therefore legitimized, directly by the citizens – the reasoning – to avoid fragile executives, who do not resist for the entire five years of the legislature, too exposed to the turbulence of the political forces in Parliament. it is very difficult to make references to foreign models that envisage the direct election of the prime minister: practically absent in Western democracies, was introduced in Israel in 1996 and abandoned in 2003. This road would have as its great supporter, on the opposition side, the Third Pole, which in the electoral program proposed the mayor of Italy. The idea – given that mayors are often a model of stability in our country – of taking a cue, to choose the head of government, by the electoral system of the big cities: the mayoral candidate is directly voted, a second round of balloting is foreseen if no one exceeds 50% of the votes in the first one and the winner is awarded a majority prize for governing.

How it works in Italy

In Italy, the President of the Republic to appoint the President of the Council of Ministers and, on his proposal, the ministers, as foreseen by thearticle 92 of the Constitution. Before appointing the premier, the head of state listens to the representatives of the parties, in consultations with the heads of the parliamentary groups. The government must have the confidence of both Chambers (article 94). One may have had the optical illusion, in our country, of having voted for the head of government: it is true that from 1994 to 2008 the coalitions that faced each other indicated who would be prime minister in case of victory (like Berlusconi for the centre-right and Prodi for the centre-left), but it was just an illusion: the model was always the same as today.

The Westminster model

A classic, when it comes to the premiership, that of the United Kingdom. It does not provide for the direct election of the head of governmentbut this is by habit the leader of the party with the most votes in elections and therefore enjoys a form of popular legitimacy. A change within the governing party can, however, lead to a change of premier even without going through the elections, as seen now with the rotation, from the 2019 vote, by Johnson, Truss and Sunak.

The Chancellorship

There is not only direct election, however, to give more strength to a prime minister like the Italian one (whose destiny of instability is written in the numbers of his predecessors: the country has changed 68 governments in 75 years, with an average duration 14 months for executive). An often mentioned model the German chancellor: in Germany the head of the federal government, the chancellor, has more powers than ours. It can, for example, ask for the revocation of a minister. And he enjoys the shield of the constructive no-confidence vote, which defends him from parliamentary turbulence: the Chambers can remove confidence from a head of government only by indicating, at the same time, a successor who has a majority in the Chamber.

The positions

If this is the premiership, how is the state of the debate in Italy? If understood as a direct election of the Prime Minister, it can have the support of the majority (FdI, Lega, FI) and, for the opposition, of the third pole of Calenda and Renzi. Instead, the Democratic Party and the 5 Star Movement are against direct elections. However, they are in favor of constructive mistrust, on the model of the chancellorship.

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