Il mito della stabilità: origini e attualità dei governi di coalizione nella prospettiva costituzionale

The main objective of the research project is the study of coalition governments in the Italian and European constitutional experience. Some lines of interpretation will be taken into consideration: a) the evolution of the parliamentary form of government as a result of electoral systems; b) the necessity of coalition agreements as a legal fact; c) the position of the President of the Council of Ministers and the progressive strengthening of government in a monocratic sense; d) the impact of European economic governance in defining political direction. The analysis of coalition governments in Italy cannot ignore a careful examination of the same case in Western democratic systems according to the method of comparison in order to determine the common and distinctive elements of the individual constitutional experiences. To understand the legal nature of government agreements, three models were taken into consideration: the German Große koalition and the Koalitionsvertrag structure, the Cameron I Government in United Kingdom, the governments presided over by Pedro Sánchez (the first coalition government in history Spanish Constitution from the Transition to today). «The history of the governments of the Italian Republic is the history of coalition governments». Gianni Ferrara stated this already in 1973, identifying their basis in the combination of two constitutional principles: the recognition of all citizens with "equal social dignity" by art. 3 of the Constitution and the right of these to «compete with a democratic method to determine national politics» through political parties enshrined in the art. 49 of the Constitution. We will therefore ask ourselves whether an alternative to the coalitional dynamic can exist in Italy in the absence of a markedly proportional electoral law and despite the political forces being increasingly less inclined to the government by discussion. The transition from coalition governments in the proportional season to government coalitions in the majoritarian season has led to a rethinking of the political compromise no longer understood as a legal act of parliamentary mediation. In comparison with advanced democracies, the short duration of Italian governments and their instability emerges. From 1946 to today, in a period of seventy-eight years, there have been sixty-eight governments presided over by thirty-one different presidents of the Council of Ministers during nineteen legislatures. The need to identify tools for rationalizing the parliamentary form of government was already hoped for during the work of the Constituent Assembly. Even the Constitutional Court with sentence no. 1 of 2014 defined the «stability of the country's government» as «an objective of constitutional importance». The mechanisms of constitutional engineering, often borrowed from other constitutional experiences, would appear in themselves insufficient to determine the good functioning of the form of government, which would instead appear to depend on the concurrence of several factors such as: the state of health of the party system, the electoral models in force, the historical evolution of the institutions, the sedimentation of constitutional traditions, the levels of socio-economic homogeneity and the political cultures prevalent in a system. The theme of stability, inevitably linked to the analysis of coalition governments and the agreements underlying their formation, would seem to depend on two interrelated variables: the form of government and the electoral system. From a historical-constitutional analysis it clearly emerges that the chronic political instability of our country is attributable not to the malfunctioning of the current form of parliamentary government but to the malfunctioning of the political system and the circuit of representation. The eternal dichotomy between proportional or majoritarian democracy, multipolar or bipolar, blocked or alternating, participatory or decisive, consociational or competitive, mediated or immediate, widespread or investiture, conflictual or governing, pluralist or identity does not constitute a nominal question but it concerns the quality of forms of government. Majority systems should belong to predominantly homogeneous systems in which competition takes place according to a rigid bipolarism (so-called Westminster model), proportional or consociational systems would instead allow conflict to be better represented in those heterogeneous systems marked by profound social, religious, linguistic and territorial (so-called consensual model). Party fragmentation, typical of the parliamentary form of government, must be seen in the light of social pluralism which, with the principle of proportionality, constitutes the strong nucleus of the coalition system. The clear prevalence of proportionalism in European constitutional systems, despite the numerous differences regarding the corrective mechanisms adopted, demonstrates that majoritarian torsions are not functional to stability. The proportional fragmentation of the political framework would restore centrality to Parliament as the place dedicated to the realization of compromise democracy in which discussion and decision cannot ignore each other. From the findings that have emerged so far, at least three considerations could be deduced regarding coalition governments: a) they cannot be attributed to the parliamentary form of government alone; b) they are not exclusive to multi-party systems; c) are not referable only to orders taken from proportional electoral formulas. In a system like the Italian one, characterized by an exaggerated multi-party system, political-institutional stability could be achieved at a constitutional and sub-constitutional level through certain corrective measures, while still leaving the parliamentary nature of the form of government unchanged. Among these: a) the introduction of constructive no-confidence as a rationalization tool functional to the parliamentarisation of crises; b) the provision of the power to propose the dismissal of Ministers vested in the Prime Minister; c) the introduction of a proportional electoral law with a threshold of five percent; d) the possible approval of a law on parties implementing the art. 49 Cost. (in itself insufficient); e) the stipulation of typical, written and public government contracts that make the parties and their respective leaders politically responsible; f) the reform of parliamentary regulations to stem the so-called transfugism in compliance with the free mandate enshrined in the art. 67 Cost. The study therefore aims to demonstrate how large coalitions in the Italian constitutional system are first and foremost an institutional necessity. The crisis of representation, electoral abstentionism, the intensification of the migratory phenomenon and globalization processes, the consequent advent of populism on an international scale and the recent military escalation are just some elements that suggest an overall rereading of parliamentary democracy and its indispensable value. The stabilization of emergencies would therefore not allow any alternative to permanent coalitions, as a method rather than as a result, to guarantee a governance of complexity. To govern large transition processes, we do not need strong governments that make decision-making an instrument of political direction but governments that are as representative as possible of the entire hemicycle in order to guarantee a democratization of choices. If constitutional law is truly the science of limits it follows that the strength of the parliamentary form of government lies precisely in its instability: only the renewed centrality of the elective assemblies could ensure the democratic anchoring of the system against any authoritarian twist or abuse of the majority .The compromise between parties is thus configured not only as an indefectible feature of the parliamentary form of government but as the only possible tool to achieve the equality of differences within a pluralist framework.