inside the office of the president of italy

INSIDE THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF ITALY PLUS

INSIDE THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF ITALY PLUS

Finally, a pact between left and right is often sought, though this is not always possible: in the 2006 election of Napolitano, he came out on top because neither left nor right managed to impose their candidates in 2013, there was not even a last-minute agreement between the political forces, which forced Napolitano to revalidate his mandate (much to his regret) and in 2015, Mattarella emerged with the votes basically of the centre-left plus a handful of 'snipers' from the centre-right whose names were never known because the vote, in this case, is secret. Moreover, he or she must have an important knowledge of the political class of the moment, since, in the event of conflicts between parties (something very common when it comes to the Italian Parliament), the President of the Republic must act as arbiter and resolve the problem of ungovernability that has just arisen, being able to resort to a non-political government (as Mattarella has recently done by commissioning Mario Draghi to form a government) or dissolve Parliament and call elections in advance if he finds that there is no real 'maggioranza' that can govern the country. The first of these is that potential candidates must have an unblemished track record, since the President of the Republic has traditionally been a figure of enormous prestige and social consideration. It is true that there are a number of unwritten rules guiding the election. For any candidacy to go ahead, it requires the favourable vote of two-thirds of the electoral body, if it is to win on the first, second or third ballot, and of half plus one of the votes after the fourth ballot. Hence, as soon as possible, the very veteran politician announced his resignation at the end of the following year and a month later the Electoral College (made up of just over a thousand people) decided to elect the former deputy prime minister and Sicilian Sergio Mattarella as the new president of the Republic.Ĭertainly, if anything in Italian politics has been particularly complex, it is the election of the head of state. But it was only a temporary election to get out of the situation, not least because Napolitano was about to turn 88 years old. Let us recall that there has only ever been one president of the Republic (Napolitano) who has repeated his mandate: it was in the spring of 2013, and it was due to the inability of both the left and the right to reach a consensus candidate. Naturally, a successor must be found, given that, although the 1948 Constitution does not provide for any term limits (nor does it do so for the president of the Council of Ministers), it is traditional for the outgoing president to be replaced by another person and re-election does not take place. We are now only seven months away from the end of the presidential term of Sergio Mattarella, tenant of the Quirinal Palace (seat of the Italian Head of State) since late January 2015.

Inside the office of the president of italy