From the Rave decree to Ilva, the Meloni government reaches 100 decree laws

One hundred decree laws , a nice round number for the Meloni government since it took office: 84 have actually become law, four are being converted and 12 have lapsed. A monthly average of 3.03 decrees per month, in line with the Draghi government (3.07) and Conte bis (3.07), but not with Conte uno (1.69). The essence of recent years, however, is that the "extraordinary cases of necessity and urgency", as provided for by the Constitution so that the government - in addition to Parliament - can exercise its own legislative prerogative, are increasingly numerous.

It started with the famous rave decree, prisons, justice and vaccination obligations, moving on to the security decree, the Bridge over the Strait or the health and tax bills, or Public Administration, sports and Jubilee, ending with the latest ones from last Thursday: one containing urgent provisions on tax matters and the other with urgent measures to support the production sectors which contains in particular provisions on the former Ilva.

Acts of this type have immediate effect, that is, from their publication in the Official Journal, which on average occurs after 4.7 days. But they lapse if they are not converted into law by the Chambers within 60 days, and it is therefore as if they had never existed. Some examples of aborted decrees? Ex Ilva bis decree (January 2025), decree on the reorganization of the school system (January 2025), decree on safe countries (October 2024), decree on fuels and Marche (November 2022).

Analyzing the available data, Openpolis has verified that from 1996 to today, a total of 2,853 laws have been approved. Of these, 730 are conversions of decrees (25.6 percent) while 979 are ratifications of international treaties (34.3 percent). This means that, in practice, the majority of the laws approved come from outside Parliament. On most occasions, and this is the political fact of the last legislatures, the executives have used the decree laws not for truly extraordinary events, but rather to quickly approve program points or in any case to deal with situations of a contingent political nature.

The issue does not seem to worry the bulk of the center-right that much: during the next Council of Ministers, which should be held on Friday afternoon, three more decrees could arrive on the government's table, respectively for the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Sport and University. Yet, in August last year, the President of the Chamber Lorenzo Fontana wrote a letter to Giorgia Meloni to denounce the "excessive use" of emergency decrees, the use of which was "debasing" Parliament. An analysis by Openpolis six months ago noted that by doing so "there is the risk of a slide from a state of emergency (temporary) towards a state of exception (structural), as defined in the academic field. Monitoring and denouncing these dynamics is therefore of fundamental importance to avoid the risk of a drift of democratic systems. Systems from which we expect answers in a very complex international context such as the current one".