“We are prepared to intervene on the technical aspects of the proposal in order to improve them,” she said after a hearing on the constitutional reform bill introducing the changes before the Senate’s Constitutional Affairs Commission.
“What we cannot abandon is direct election, because the prime ministership already represents a mediation, given that we started from [the idea of introducing] a presidential system of government,” added Casellati.
Leading Constitutional experts Sabino Cassese and Antonio Baldassarre have called on the government to abandon its plans to introduce the direct election of the PM and begin a process of constitutional reform that is shared by the opposition.
Under the current system in Italy, parties engage in government-formation talks after a general election and then the coalition that forms a ruling majority in parliament agrees on a figure to propose to the President of the Republic to become prime minister.
That figure is not necessarily one of the politicians given by the parties as their candidate for PM during the election campaign.
The centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) has slammed the proposed reform as “dangerous”, saying that it “weakens parliament and the prerogatives of the President of the Republic”.
PD leader Elly Schlein described it as “a distortion of the Constitution and the parliamentary Republic”.
“We will use every available dialectical tool in parliament to oppose a project that we consider to be dangerous,” she continued.
ANSA
