After years of discussions, in which almost all the parties agreed without moving on to the facts, the Government puts down on paper the plan to revive the direct election of presidents and provincial councillors. It does so in the reform of the Consolidated Law on local authorities, which returns to the Council of Ministers after a freeze of over three years following the preliminary examination in August 2023. Compared to that version, the bill has been significantly enriched. But it reaches approval in the final stretch of the legislature: a non-negligible detail for an enabling law, which after the final approval would give the Government 12 months for an overall review of the local authority regulations.
The move, therefore, is first and foremost a political signal. Which overcomes the many timidities on the topic to meet a substantially unanimous pressure from the parties, whose provincial administrators, who are first of all mayors, have long complained about the unmanageable stasis in which the Provinces have been left since, ten years ago, the reform that aimed to abolish them was wrecked in the "no" referendum of 2016. It is the "limbo" that the Head of State Sergio Mattarella once again spoke about at the national assembly at the beginning of October of the UPI in Imperia, asking the Government and Parliament to intervene to put large area bodies back in a position to be able to provide services to their citizens. The arrival of the delegation in the Council of Ministers responds to this need: even if in all likelihood it will be the next legislature that will have to finish the job.
The main dish, destined to revive the discussions on the "costs of politics", is precisely the return of direct election by universal suffrage for the presidents and councilors of the Provinces, with the consequent re-entry into the field of the provincial councilors. The reform would archive the second level vote which today calls the local administrators of the territories to the polls. The delegation is also concerned with defining the electoral mechanism, based on multi-member constituency lists regulated by guarantees on gender equality. And it plans to avoid a runoff when a candidate exceeds the threshold of 40% of the votes, a result that would be accompanied by a majority bonus that would award the winning coalition 60% of the seats in the council. In this way the reform thus recovers the threshold already designed also for Municipalities above 15 thousand inhabitants in the centre-right bill (the first signatures are from Lucio Malan of FdI, Maurizio Gasparri of Fi, Massimiliano Romeo of the League and Micaela Biancofiore of Noi Moderati) which is struggling to take off in the Senate. In this regard, the delegation also requests the harmonization of the electoral rules for mayors.
In the ambitions of provincial administrators, the return of direct election must be accompanied by a strengthening of provincial functions, also to prevent the discussion from returning to the sterile questions of posts and related allowances. The delegation deals with this, albeit in more general terms, providing for a reorganization of the fundamental functions of Municipalities, Provinces and metropolitan cities. The principle requires that each level of government be attributed only the activities "connected to the satisfaction of the primary needs of the communities of reference", on the basis of adequacy criteria measured on the size of each type of entity. In this redesign, the text specifies, the Provinces will be attributed "all the functions necessary for supra-municipal exercise", starting from those that today are assigned to the tangled forest of local bodies and authorities: structures that have multiplied over the years, even if they often have no visibility in the eyes of citizens.
The text then finds space for the idea, also nurtured for some time, of a form of support for entities at risk of mafia infiltration as an alternative to commissionership. The forecast is that of collaborative support to identify and counter the influence of organized crime without leading, when possible, to the cancellation of the representation elected by citizens.
