Less than a month to go until the election of the new President of the Republic. Will Draghi move from Palazzo Chigi to the Quirinale? Will Mattarella accept the encore or will Berlusconi win? Many, including the pandemic, are the unknowns relating to the new tenant of the Colle, but some are little known.
Not everyone knows that the by-elections will be held in Rome on January 16 next to elect the successor of Roberto Gualtieri, the former Minister of Economy who left his seat in Montecitorio after being elected mayor of the capital. Supplements are not a new fact for the Lazio 1-01 college given that Gualtieri himself was elected deputy only in December 2019 after Paolo Gentiloni had obtained the appointment as European Commissioner of the Economy. Nothing strange so far, except that for the second half of January Parliament is expected to meet in joint session to elect the new Head of State. The President of the Chamber Roberto Fico will communicate the exact date only next January 4, but the session should be scheduled around January 20, that is a few days after the vote of the supplementary in Rome. And here the problem arises. In theory, according to the law, the losers have the right to contest the outcome within two weeks from the supplementary dates, that is when the big voters have already started to vote to choose Mattarella’s successor. In this regard, Antonio Baldassarre, president emeritus of the Constitutional Court, interviewed by the Giornale, explains: “This is a remote possibility because, to ask for a possible recount, there must be two competitors who end up almost on a par and it seems to me very difficult that this can happen. Then, – he adds – also as regards the vote for the President of the Republic, there should be a candidate who prevails over the other by a single vote ». Even if the eventual appeal may, apparently, seem like a school case, the political knot remains. It is, in fact, unusual for a deputy to vote for the new tenant of the Colle less than a week after his entry into Parliament. And it would be even more unusual if this deputy were also a member of parliament whose victory in the polls is contested. “It would have been better to call the supplementary first because Parliament must be as complete as possible,” says Baldassarre. But this is not the only anomaly. The matter of the disputed seat between the deputy of Italia Viva (formerly Forza Italia) Vicenzo Carbone and the president of Lazio Claudio Lotito remains unresolved. And, if from the constitutional point of view Baldassarre does not see major problems, from the political point of view he points the finger at “parliamentary malpractice because, in one way or another, this affair had to be resolved first”. The match for the Colle begins, therefore, with an organizational machine that seems somewhat flooded.
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