An obituary for Silvio Berlusconi

The publication of this special issue, devoted to the role of the President of the Republic, coincides with the end of an era in Italian politics, marked by the death of Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi contributed to the developing political role of the head of state in a number of ways. The first came with the so-called ‘ribaltone’ in 1994/95, when the collapse of the entrepreneur’s first government led to its replacement by a technocratic government supported by the Lega Nord (Northern League, NL) and the parties of the centre left. Then, Berlusconi had complained bitterly at the President’s decision to appoint the new government rather than to dissolve Parliament. Berlusconi argued that as Prime Minister, he had received a direct popular mandate, that his government had collapsed thanks to the treachery of one of its components (the NL) and that therefore there should be fresh elections for the conferral of a new mandate. That President Oscar Luigi Scafaro was able to resist this line of reasoning – in any case incorrect: in parliamentary democracies, voters elect legislatures, not governments, whose legitimacy in turn derives from their enjoying the confidence of the legislature – did much to strengthen the presidential role in the new context of party-system bi-polarity that had been ushered in with the election of 1994. It was arguably due to this ‘spat’ between Berlusconi and Scalfaro that the entrepreneur’s 2005 constitutional reform project included proposals limiting the two most significant presidential powers: the power to dissolve Parliament (article 88, Cost.) and the power to appoint ‘the President of the Council of Ministers and, on their proposal, the Ministers’ (article 92, Cost.). The project failed to achieve the necessary ratification in the constitutional referendum held the following year. However, had the project gone ahead; then, the resignation of a prime minister would have prevented the legislature from forming a majority different from the one resulting from the election and – in the absence of a willingness of the latter majority to carry on under a different prime minister – obliged the President to dissolve. Presidents would have lost all discretion in the appointment of prime ministers – whose appointments would have been expressly tied to ‘the results of the elections for the Chamber of Deputies’ – and their power to appoint ministers would have been transferred to the Prime Minister. The events surrounding Berlusconi’s resignation in 2011, in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, suggested to many that by then Italy had acquired a de facto semi-presidential system of government. As Berlusconi’s authority began to decline significantly during the summer of that year, President Napolitano was able to play an active role in getting anticrisis budget measures passed in record time. By the autumn, Berlusconi was facing the threat of a vote of no confidence in the face of which he made a last-ditch attempt to save his position by promising to resign once a package of anti-crisis measures agreed with the EU had been passed. In the meantime, he might salvage his majority and avoid, in the end, actually having to deliver on the promise. Instead, CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN POLITICS 2023, VOL. 15, NO. 3, 283–286 https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2023.2233192