Italians come in all shapes and sizes. From north to south, they are as varied as the Country is long. Technically, Italy is a Parliamentary Democracy with a President serving as the Head of State and a “primus inter pares” (Prime) Minister acting as the Head of Government. Parliament elects the President for a term of seven years. In turn, the President appoints the Head of Government, who usually is the Leader of the dominant political party or coalition (of parties).
The Country is divided into Twenty Regions: Fifteen are governed by “standard” Charters and Five by “special,” self-governing Charters (Vallée d’Aoste, Trentino-Sued Tirol, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sicily, and Sardinia). Italy is a “Unitary State,” meaning a single political territory, entity, or state subject to the same laws. Italy’s Institutions are defined and regulated by a written Constitution, which a stand-up comedian once heralded as the “most beautiful in the World.”
Since World War II, the backlash against Fascism resulted in rule by the Democratic Christian Party and the Communist Party, sometimes allied in broader coalitions with the Socialists. For years after the War, these parties tended to fill the so-called “deep state” with party members and sympathizers. These same parties wooed Italian voters by offering competing welfare programs that were increasingly social-minded and expensive. The result is a mammoth National Debt that today is fast approaching three trillion Dollars. Following WW II, the major political parties began to fill the state bureaucracies with their own: from teachers and bureaucrats to the judiciary. Party rivalry soon corrupted many aspects of Italian public life. Electoral laws based on majority rule, associated with Fascism, were dropped in the Republic’s early days for more “democratic” electoral laws based on proportional representation.
Proportional representation, however, was not enough to stop Georgia Meloni from running away with the recent general elections. Italians are evidently fed up with “progressive” politicians that have saddled everyone with higher taxes in exchange for diminishing returns. After Italy’s incredible highway grid of the “swinging sixties”, the “progressive” leadership stopped investing in infrastructure: 0 nuclear plants; 0 increase in domestic oil production; 0 drilling of new oil wells in the high Adriatic where deposits of natural gas and oil are reported to be significant. No major investments in Italian seaports or airports. How “progressive” administrations managed to run up Italy’s huge National Debt is beyond comprehension. In Emilia-Romagna where the Author lives and where local governments have uninterruptedly been in the hands of “progressive” Administrations since the end of WW II, the region’s new “parkway” system is still incomplete after decades of work.
Still, unscrupulous politicians would have the Government legislate jus soli citizenship laws without repealing present citizenship laws based on jus sanguinis, creating a legal nightmare for the immigration authorities. Italy is not America. The size of Arizona, Italy is densely populated especially north of Rome. But some politicians would leave no stone unturned to give illegal aliens free and unlimited access to Italy’s eight thousand miles of coastline. Why? Perhaps because some of them are looking to receive kickbacks from NGO ships picking up migrants from overcrowded boats in Maltese waters or the Sicilian channel. That, or in the hope migrants may one day vote for them. Malta refuses to take migrants. Their Coast Guard regularly escorts such craft to the nearest Italian port.
Once on Italian soil, migrants already have practically the same rights as citizens, including free medical care by Italy’s NHS. Without knowing it, such politicians have devalued the very citizenship they appear willing to grant anyone born on Italian soil. Go figure.