The proportion of people convinced, or at least fearful, that Donald Trump is mentally ill and continues to cause damage to the entire world is growing and widespread. Much smaller, however, is the number who worry about the possibility granted to the US president to inflict such harm on the planet. If the most powerful state is in the hands of a madman, the real problem is that its democracy and international bodies have not been and, worse still, are not now able to resolve a case of mental instability. Trump and the so-called autocrats act out of horror vacui, occupying the vacuum left by the UN, European Union, NATO, etc. That the Chinese and Pakistanis are now seen as peace mediators confirms this in a disheartening way.
Moving on to domestic affairs, the paradigm finds another disturbing application. We have torn ourselves apart for months with opposing chatter about the justice referendum without asking ourselves whether, at the bottom of the issues raised, there was not an unresolved and unspoken one: the obligatoriness of criminal prosecution from which the power of the judiciary and the possibility of abusing it derive. More or less the situation that is taking shape regarding electoral reforms, for which we discuss premiership, minimum thresholds, majority bonuses, without addressing the well-known issues, such as the mandate constraint and the “simul stabunt simul cadent.”
The system linking the fate of the legislative body and the executive is already in force in local administrative bodies in order to guarantee their stability, preventing upheavals and changes of majority. It would be enough to apply it to Parliament, which would then need another simple improvement, unicameralism, which would eliminate duplications and slowdowns in which countless good normative intentions get stuck during the legislature. Certainly, there is also the lazy inertia of many elected officials to consider, for which it would suffice to rigidly parameterize salaries to attendance and activity carried out, thus incentivizing productivity.
Even deeper than these changes lies the mother of all reforms, the abolition of the separation of powers. That between the judiciary and the political could also be just softened, making the specularity of the control action effective, today disproportionate: magistrates can indeed investigate and condemn ministers and parliamentarians as well as, if the latter approve laws they dislike, nullify them with other rulings. This is not just propaganda from the current majority, let’s acknowledge it. Even more radical and simple would be the dissolution of the now obsolete duplication between executive and legislative. When voting, one would want to obtain a power capable of doing what was promised during the term. It is an almost impossible thing, we know, since electoral campaigns boast miracles, but concentrating decision-making mechanisms in a single body would reduce the gap.
Liberal-parliamentary democracies are notoriously the lesser of political evils, but they have largely had their day. Today we ask for more security than rights, more speed and efficiency than checks and balances. At least in our fortunate part of the world where no one persecutes us or is persecuted for what we say, write, post on social media and where, all in all, we stitch together lunch with dinner with dignity.
