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Seventy governments, and why it is not what it looks like
The number Matteo gives is real and it is the single most misread fact about Italy. Since 1946 there have been around seventy governments and about twenty parliaments, which reads from outside as a state in permanent crisis. It is better understood as a different definition of the word government. A new Italian government is counted whenever the prime minister changes or the coalition is renegotiated, and because no party has won a majority on its own since 1948, coalitions are the normal condition rather than an emergency measure. The ministers reshuffle, the civil service does not, and the regions and the comuni that deliver most services are elected on their own cycles. Italians therefore follow national politics with intense interest and limited expectation, which is a stance foreigners mistake for cynicism. Two features behind it are worth knowing. The bicameralismo perfetto Alex trips over was a deliberate choice in 1947 by people who had just lived under a dictatorship and designed a system that could not be captured quickly; it works as intended, and it is slow as intended. And the electoral law has been rewritten repeatedly — each version acquiring a nickname, and one of them being called a porcata by the man who drafted it, which became its name in the press. Note the consequence for a learner: Italians will explain their own system to you at length and disagree with each other while doing it, and the disagreement is the most accurate part of the explanation.