The Meloni government in the context of the ‘smaller’ parliament: new programmes, old equipment

ABSTRACT

This article assesses, a few months after the Meloni government’s inauguration, the extent to which the new executive has as compared to its predecessors, been an executive of change. The significant shifts that had taken place in the political landscape gave rise to expectations of considerable innovation. The Meloni government is the first led by a woman; it marks the return of a centre-right majority coalition to power, and it operates within a parliament that is smaller due to the 2020 constitutional reform that reduced the number of deputies and senators. In light of these factors, we examine whether the Government’s actions are different compared to its predecessors based on the Prime Minister’s profile and the political and technical qualifications of ministers. We test our expectations by analysing the Government’s legislative activity, particularly focusing on the 2024 budget. However, the findings fail to support our expectations for the period under investigation, as long-term trends prevailed.

KEYWORDS:

• Meloni government
• ministerial profiles
• cabinet governance
• legislative activity
• budgeting policy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Elisabetta De Giorgi, Catherine Moury, Andrea Pritoni and participants in the Workshop ‘Politica in Italia/Italian Politics 2024’ (SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, Bologna) for their precious comments on an earlier version of this article. Michelangelo Vercesi carried out most of the work for this article while he was a researcher at the Institute Português de Relações Internacionais (IPRI) of the Universidade NOVA in Lisbon. He would like to thank the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH) of the University and his colleagues at IPRI for their support and for providing him with a welcoming working environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The populist character of FdI has been contested by Vassallo and Vignati (2023). Here, however, we have opted to follow the convention established by the comparative literature on populism. See, among others, Rooduijn et al. (2023).

2. In the sense that they have been at least a parliamentarian, a minister and/or a party leader before taking office.

3. Technocratic appointees, although lacking political resources, derive their strength from the legitimation stemming from the strongly ‘presidential’ character of their mandates (Barbieri and Vercesi 2022).

4. According to the literature, this reflected the inability of policy makers to implement public policies of broader scope, a circumstance that resulted in the ‘hyper-production’ of acts of an incremental, if not exclusively micro-sectoral nature (Cotta 1994; Di Palma 1978).

5. See: https://temi.camera.it/leg19/pnrr/cronoprogramma.html.

6. The Italian Constitution provides that, in extraordinary cases of necessity and urgency, the government may introduce, on its own authority, provisional measures with the force of law, which lose their effectiveness if they are not converted into law by Parliament within sixty days of their publication.

7. This was what lay behind the intervention of the former group leader of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) in the Chamber of Deputies, Debora Serracchiani, when, in the debate on the conversion of decree-law no. 123/2023 containing ‘Urgent measures to combat hardship among the young’, she queried the decree’s constitutionality. On that occasion, she complained that the government had ‘broken all possible and imaginable records with an average of four decree-laws per month’ (Debora Serracchiani, stenographic report of the session of the Assembly of the Chamber of Deputies of 31 October 2023, https://documenti.camera.it/leg19/resoconti/assembly/html/sed0188/stenografico.pdf). The problem was stated even more clearly by the PD when, at the end of October 2023, it sent a letter signed by its group leaders in the two branches of Parliament, to the presidents of the Chamber and Senate. In the letter, it complained of a genuine ‘democratic emergency’, arguing that the executive was flagrantly abusing its power to issue emergency decrees (https://senatoripd.it/boccia-braga-su-decreti-e-emergency-democratica-lettera-a-presidenti-camere).

8. See, among others, ‘I numeri del governo Meloni a un anno dalla nomina’, www.openpolis, 26 October 2023.

9. In the cases of the Conte II and Draghi governments, the two executives most directly confronted by the pandemic emergency, the percentage of decree-laws at the end of the first 14 months stood at 74% and over 80% respectively. Aside from these two cases, the highest percentages in the last fifteen years have been set by the Berlusconi IV and the Gentiloni governments, whose rates of recourse to emergency decrees stood at 50% and 61% respectively.

10. The first Conte government, with 48%, is an exception.

11. In contrast, Di Carlo and Simoni in this special issue analyse Italian economic policy and especially that of the Meloni government by analysing the balance between taxation and expenditure, budget deficits and the public debt, in order to evaluate the country’s macroeconomic circumstances and choices generally.

12. From 2016, following approval of the Renzi government’s last budget law, changes in the allocation of spending between the budget law and the same year’s budget bill (which serve, as already mentioned, as a measure of the balance of power between the Government and Parliament) declined dramatically. In 2021, the difference was zero, meaning that the legislature achieved no changes with respect to the finance bill the Conte II government presented that year (Cavalieri 2023).

13. In light of Di Carlo and Simoni’s discussion (this issue) of the Meloni government’s macroeconomic policy, it is important to note that our observation concerning the reduction in spending does not conflict with the two authors’ suggestion that the budget was slightly expansionary. The Supplement to the Economy and Finance Document (the Nota di Aggiornamento al Documento di Economia e Finanza, NaDef) referred to ‘a careful rationalization of expenditure’, and the intention to bring budget balances ‘back to the programmed values through spending control measures, the review of subsidies and a reduction in the fiscal gap’ (Ministero dell’Economia e delle finanze, Documento di economia e finanza 2023. Nota di aggiornamento, Roma, https://www.mef.gov.it/focus/2023/documenti/article_00049/NADEF-2023.pdf, pp. 55 e 17).

14. Fratelli d’Italia, ‘PER L’ITALIA, Accordo quadro di programma per un Governo di centrodestra’, https://www.fratelli-italia.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/PER-LITALIA-Accordo-quadro-di-programma-per-un-Governo-di-centrodestra.pdf, p. 12.

15. ‘Pronti a risollevare l’Italia. IL PROGRAMMA’ (see p. 32; https://www.fratelli-italia.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brochure _programma_FdI_qr_def.pdf).

16. For further information, see the article by Fontanelli and Echeverría in this issue.

17. Fratelli d’Italia, ‘Pronti a risollevare l’Italia. IL PROGRAMMA’, https://www.fratelli-italia.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brochure _programma_FdI_qr_def.pdf, p. 37; and, ‘PER L’ITALIA, Accordo quadro di programma per un Governo di centrodestra’ cit.

18. Ibid. p.1.

19. The League and FI presented three amendments co-signed by the two groups in the Senate Budget Committee, but did not present any in the Chamber.

20. Consiglio dei Ministri n. 54. Conferenza stampa, https://stream24.ilsole24ore.com/video/italia/manovra-diretta-conformazione-stampa/AFWugNGB.

21. See, for example, G. Bartoloni, ‘I decreti legge mortificano il Parlamento». Ma ora Meloni ne sforna 40 in 11 mesi: è record, superati i ritmi di pandemia’, la Repubblica, 26 September 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Cavalieri

Alice Cavalieri is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Trieste, where she works on a project about the effect of crises on democratic processes. Her research concerns agenda-setting and policy changes, decision-making processes, and budgeting policy. Her works appear on national and international journals and her first book, Italian Budgeting Policy. Between Punctuations and Incrementalism, has been recently published for Springer Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Francesco Marangoni

Francesco Marangoni is associate professor in Political Science at the University of Siena. His main research interests concern political elite, representative institutions, legislative behavior. His more recent works has been published by international journals like South European Society and Politics, The Journal of Legislative Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

Michelangelo Vercesi

Michelangelo Vercesi is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Naples Federico II and Affiliate member of the Center for the Study of Democracy of Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is Co-Editor of the EJPR Political Data Yearbook and Board member of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Elites (IPSA RC02). His research focuses on comparative government, political elites, and party politics. On these topics, he has published several journal articles as well as a recent book on Prime Ministers in Europe. Changing Career Experiences and Profiles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), with Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Jan Berz.