Parliament increasingly a paper pusher: between decrees and votes of confidence, the Chambers are reduced to a formal body

In the current legislature, the Italian Parliament has progressively lost its institutional centrality, being relegated to a mere executor of the decisions adopted by the Government. From October 2022 to June 2025, the executive led by Giorgia Meloni has issued 100 decree-laws, an absolute record compared to the last four legislatures. In the same period, there was an average of three decree-laws per month, a frequency comparable only to the Conte II and Draghi governments , in the midst of the pandemic emergency. The highest figure since 1996.

At the same time, dozens and dozens of confidence votes were raised between the Chamber and the Senate, an average of almost 3 per month, which forced Parliament to approve texts without amendments. In the Senate, the regulation provides that the placing of confidence entails the cancellation of the discussion on the agenda. Confidence votes, already instruments that are not very compatible with the representative Parliament, are used here with such intensity as to make the Chambers a formal body, incapable of influencing the content of the laws. Moreover, the most relevant issues on the political and institutional level are addressed with decrees. Laws initiated by parliament address more technical and marginal issues.

The Constitution attributes to Parliament the exclusive function of exercising legislative power ( art. 70 of the Constitution ) and political control over the Executive. Legislative decrees, powers attributed to the Government “ in extraordinary cases” ( art. 77 of the Constitution ), are granted only in the presence of an unavoidable necessity and urgency, and require parliamentary conversion within 60 days. When this mechanism is transformed into ordinary practice, with systematic confidence votes, the procedure is emptied of its constitutional nature, limiting discussion, transparency and the autonomy of the legislative assembly. The President of the Republic , Sergio Mattarella, has repeatedly called on the Government to avoid the excessive use of legislative decrees — for example by raising doubts about “omnibus decrees” — and by emphasizing the need to respect the balance of powers and the role of Parliament. Yet, these calls have gone unheard, and the abuse of the institution continues systematically. In this way, Parliament is progressively debased: from a body representing political demands and citizens, it is transformed into a "crutch" of the Executive, incapable of truly proposing or modifying laws, especially when the principle of confidence requires immediate approval of government texts.

At the end of the Second World War , Italy emerged from a twenty-year period in which Parliament had been practically rendered inert by the Nazi-Fascist dictatorship. The Chambers had ceased to represent the sovereign people, annihilated by a totalitarian regime that annulled rights and freedoms. It was only thanks to the War of Liberation and the partisan struggle that the Italian people managed to overthrow that horrendous regime, reappropriating their sovereignty and paving the way for the Republican Constitution of 1948. The constituents, aware of the risk of an excess of power concentrated in the Executive, established a rigorous balance between powers, with a Parliament free to deliberate, propose amendments, influence legislative processes and represent every component of society. Today, however, we are witnessing a regression that summarizes, albeit on a different scale, the tendency to compress popular sovereignty. According to the Constitution, Parliament remains the “home of Italians where legislative power is exercised ”, a place where majority and minority must be able to discuss proposals, express opinions and find collective solutions. Reducing it to a passive body means betraying those democratic values ​​and that historical lesson for which our system was fought and oxygenated.

The Constitution designs an active, sovereign Parliament, a counterweight to the Executive, as my colleague Federico Fornaro rightly pointed out in his latest book “A Democracy Without a People ”. If the practice of intensive use of decree-laws and votes of confidence continues, Italy risks a cultural and institutional return to a model in which the law and representation are decided without adequate debate, involvement and transparency. Relaunching Parliament as a true place of discussion, proposal and control means not only respecting the Charter, but embodying the spirit of liberation, preserving democracy and reaffirming the centrality of the sovereign people: listening, amending, directing; not obeying.

In this sense, it is surprising that many parliamentarians of the so-called majority passively accept the progressive emptying of powers of the Chamber and Senate. This is also demonstrated by the carelessness with which the control activity on the executive is exercised even in the face of precise reports that are made through the reports and memoranda of the Court of Auditors and the Parliamentary Budget Office. This picture clearly demonstrates that without a return to parliamentary centrality, Italy risks forgetting the most profound lesson of its democratic history.

*Secretary of the Presidency of the Chamber, PD group leader Ecomafia Commission

FROM

Stephen Vaccari