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President Meloni’s press statement following the Government’s discussions with opposition parliamentary groups on institutional reforms

Tuesday, 9 May 2023

[The following video is available in Italian only]

Good evening.
A day of consultation with opposition political forces on the subject of constitutional reform.
As you know, one of the goals of the governing majority’s programme is to reform the institutions of the Italian Republic, essentially to ensure two objectives that, for us, are fundamental: the stability of governments and legislatures, and respect for citizens’ votes at the ballot box.
With regard to these two objectives, we have begun discussions with the opposition political forces to understand if there is alignment and, consequently, to understand which out of the many possible systems (we have not proposed a ‘ready-made’ solution of our own) can be envisaged as having the broadest alignment. In my view, this was a fruitful and very interesting day of discussions. As you have seen, we discussed a lot with all the delegations. This is our goal, without prejudice to our commitment to citizens to put sovereignty back in their hands as much as possible and to guarantee a more mature democracy, without the problems of the instability we have experienced throughout the history of our Republic and which has no parallel in other large western democracies.
Based on these discussions and the positions expressed by the opposition parties – which were actually very varied - from one delegation to another, we will now try to draw up our own proposal that takes into consideration the assessments that have been made. 
It appears to me that a priori there is quite across-the-board, more definite, resistance to systems with a presidential or semi-presidential model, while judgements are instead more varied regarding the possibility of the President of the Council of Ministers, the Head of Government, being directly elected. As we have always said, we are not in love with a specific system. There are many systems in other democracies that can be taken as examples, and there is also the possibility of envisaging an Italian model. We did not come with our own proposal because we thought it was important to also discuss the system of rules with the other political forces. We therefore gladly listened, and I wish to thank all the political forces, the parliamentary groups that have taken part because the discussions were very open and frank, but also collaborative and they have helped us to get a clearer picture. We will continue with our dialogue also at other institutional levels, with the State-Regions Conference, with mayors and probably also with intermediate bodies. At the end of this process of reasoning, after gathering all considerations, without prejudice to the commitment we have made to citizens to allow their votes to be respected and to foster a mature democracy in which governments do not fall after a year and a half, we will formulate our proposal.
Thank you for your patience, I will now take your questions. 

[Courtesy translation]