Giorgia Meloni has suffered the first significant defeat of her three-and-a-half-year premiership.
The Italians have roundly rejected her plans to reform Italy’s sclerotic judicial system – even though those plans were in the election manifesto that persuaded so many of them to vote for her. It is unlikely now that any Italian government will attempt such a reform for another generation. Italy is condemned to remain a country where the motto in every court in the peninsula – ‘La legge è uguale per tutti’ (the law is equal for all) – is but a sick joke.
Defeat is a big blow not just to Meloni but to all who dreamed of change
Still, Italy’s first female prime minister – the third longest surviving of Italy’s 69 governments since the fall of fascism – has no intention of resigning. Her right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party is as popular in the polls as when it won the 2022 election – a virtually unheard of state of affairs in a western democracy. Her coalition remains rock solid despite the odd bit of posturing by Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega, whereas the opposition parties remain unable even to form a coalition. But undoubtedly Giorgia Meloni’s halo of invincibility shines far less brightly.
The ‘popolo’ voted by 54 per cent to 46 per cent against the Meloni reform in a referendum held on Sunday and Monday with a high-ish turnout of just under 60 per cent. Parliament had approved the reform but not by the required two thirds majority as it would have meant changing the constitution. So the matter had to go to a referendum.
It was bad luck that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, both very unpopular in Italy, launched their war on Iran during the referendum campaign. The war itself is unpopular enough but it also sent the price of petrol and diesel through the roof to above €2 a litre.
Meloni has been the EU leader closest to the US President and inevitably Italians also used the referendum as a vote on her premiership. In recent days, she has tried to position herself, not very convincingly, as neither condemning nor supporting the war. The danger is that this comes across as weak fence-sitting rather than astute realpolitik.
Defeat is a big blow not just to Meloni but to all who dreamed of change.
Opponents of the reform ranted and raved successfully that it would deprive the judiciary of its liberty and place it under government control. In fact, the reform would have meant the exact opposite: it would have prevented judges who impose their political agenda on the judiciary – they are mainly left-wing and nicknamed ‘Toghe Rosse’ (Red Togas) – from doing so.
But it was not to be and so now it is back to business as usual.
Italy’s judicial system is agonisingly slow, incompetent, and politicised. This means, for instance, that it is all too often quite impossible to know whether the accused is guilty or not when a court case at last ends, which after countless appeals and counter appeals can be many years. This is especially so if it is a gruesome criminal case, or involves someone famous, and so becomes a trial by media. For instance, who murdered Meredith Kercher on that Halloween night in 2007 in Perugia? No one has the faintest idea. Judges themselves leak the juiciest bits of evidence and salacious gossip during the investigation phase before a trial takes place. This makes a mockery of the concept of a fair trial.
I personally am involved in a labyrinthine legal odyssey that is now in its 21st year involving various types of judge in various cities. I have no money to pay a lawyer but earn just too much to be able to get one free. Thank God, then, for Stefano who smokes cheroots and has a gunmetal Porsche Targa and defends me gratis out of pity. At least when every now and again he wins a case for me and a judge orders my assailant to cough up costs, he does get those – even if it does nothing to stop the never-ending conveyor belt from grinding out new cases.
Some years ago, then US ambassador to Rome John Philips in a speech to Italian businessmen said that the main reason American companies invested more in tiny countries like Belgium than in Italy – the world’s eighth largest economy – was the inability of Italy’s justice system to guarantee the enforceability of contracts.
Italy’s judiciary is undoubtedly short of manpower but aside from that a key reason for its sclerotic state is that both prosecuting judges and presiding judges are part of the same professional body called La Magistratura. So the Italian equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary in England and Wales are one and the same thing. The Meloni reforms planned to change this.
Such a system inevitably causes collusion between prosecuting judges – the equivalent of players in a game of football – and presiding judges, the equivalent of the referee.
The Magistratura is self-governed by a ruling council whose 33 members are mostly judges elected by Italy’s 10,000 judges but include ten lay members elected by parliament. The Consiglio Superiore, as it is called, is highly politicised, and can and does use its powers to destroy the careers of those judges who cross swords with it. Meloni’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio, called the system for electing its governing body ‘a para-mafioso mechanism’. The left shouted for days: ‘How dare he!’
I live in Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna which along with adjacent Tuscany was the stronghold of the Italian Communist party – the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Union – that ran, and still does run via its heirs, though less easily and universally, both regional and local government. Emilia-Romagna registered the highest number of ‘No’ voters – 67 per cent.
‘Every day I see collusion between the [prosecuting judges] and the presiding judges on anything from ordering the phone of X to be intercepted without proper justification, to deciding to hold someone in custody with no justification,’ Stefano tells me.
To stop such collusion Meloni proposed to split these two types of judge into two separate bodies with separate ruling councils as happens in most modern democracies. She also proposed that the method of choosing the members of the ruling councils be changed from an election to a lottery. The aim was to stop control of the ruling councils being in the hands of political factions as at present and to create a working environment in which judges would feel both obliged to work swiftly, competently and impartially – but also be liberated from political pressure applied on them by those in command of their profession.
‘Sadly the people, especially young people, believed the propaganda of the left and voted No,’ Stefano says. ‘But how on earth can a lottery to choose the governing body of the judges possibly place them under the control of the government?’
The Italian justice system reminds me of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce where there is fog everywhere and ‘at the very heart of the fog sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery’:
‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit … there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.’
‘If Yes had won you would have seen for the first time a tsunami of prosecutions for illegal bribes by the Coop Rosse in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to local politicians,’ Stefano added. ‘Not because a right-wing government would’ve ordered the pubblici ministeri [prosecuting judges] to do so – though that’s inevitably how it would be treated by left-wing politicians and journalists – but simply because judges would have been freed from control by the Toghe Rosse in the Consiglio Superiore.’
The ‘Coop Rosse’ (Red Co-ops) are the network of cooperatives through which the left has run large swathes of the economy, especially in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, since the second world war.
Meloni has said on social media that the result was ‘a lost opportunity to modernise Italy’. But she added: ‘Sovereignty belongs to the people and the Italians have today expressed themselves clearly.’ Indeed they have.
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