Italy after the Constitutional Referendum: Legal and Political Scenarios, from the Public Debate to the ‘Electoral Question’

The aim of this paper is to illustrate and critically discuss events, debates, legal and political facts developing after the rejection of the constitutional reform by the constitutional referendum occurred in the past December. In the section I the paper takes into consideration the crisis of government, underlining its characters and peculiarities; in the section II it studies the consequences of the crisis, with a special attention to the kind of government created due to the crisis. The sections III, IV and V focus on the main post-referendum issue, which is the choice of the electoral system. The paper analyzes the problems deriving from the rejection of the constitutional reform for the (potential) application of the legge 6 May 2015 no 52. Then, it studies the complaints filed to the Constitutional Court, investigates the ways open to the Court, and, at the end, makes a focus on the recent decision of the Constitutional Court (judgment no 35 of 2017). The last section proposes some concluding remarks, taking into consideration three main features that seem to be affected by the ‘post-referendum’ events: the system of government; the relationship between representative and direct democracy; and the role of the Constitutional Court, permanently swinging between politics and jurisdiction.