In the Italian public debate, the formula ‘the most beautiful Constitution in the world’ recurs almost ritually , resurfacing even during the referendum campaign on justice as a symbolic argument against any changes. The point, however, is not to defend the Constitution, but how it is defended.

That formula belongs neither to comparative constitutional law nor to political science. It is a slogan. Constitutions are not judged by their beauty, but by balance of power, decision-making capacity, stability and adaptability.

The rhetoric of the ‘most beautiful Constitution in the world’ has thus turned a reformable text into a political fetish, making any revision an alleged threat to democracy. Dismantling this rhetoric does not mean striking at the Constitution, but returning it to its true nature: that of a historical and perfectible institutional instrument.

Constituent compromise and the myth of perfection

The Italian Constitution was born as a high compromise between different political cultures, but this very compromising nature also marked some of its structural limits. Piero Calamandrei was among the first to point this out with great lucidity. Although he strongly defended the democratic value of the Charter, he never considered it a perfect and self-sufficient device.

Calamandrei often used mechanical metaphors to describe the nature of the Constitution, comparing it to a machine made up of parts of great quality, but not always perfectly coordinated. The fundamental principles – freedom, equality, rights and parliamentary representation – represented excellent components, the result of the encounter between the different political traditions present in the Constituent Assembly: liberal, Catholic and socialist. The problem, however, was not the quality of the individual elements, but their integration into the overall functioning of the state.

This reflection is linked to his famous lecture to Milanese students in 1955, in which he explained that the Constitution is not a machine that moves on its own: even the best institutional device remains immobile if citizens do not put the ‘fuel’ of civic commitment and political participation into it every day.

However, perplexity about the institutional architecture of the new Republic did not only come from Calamandrei. Even Benedetto Croce, while supporting the birth of the Republic, viewed the Italian constitutional construction with caution, fearing that the system could be progressively dominated by mass parties and their organisational logic, reducing the autonomy of representative institutions.

These concerns were also set in a European context still marked by the trauma of the Weimar Republic, which had shown how a formally democratic constitution could prove incapable of guaranteeing political stability and governability. In Italy, too, this precedent reinforced mistrust towards any form of concentration of power.

The result was an institutional architecture designed primarily to limit power, rather than to organise its efficient exercise. It is no coincidence that as early as the 1950s, the slogan ‘let us apply the Constitution‘ was spreading: the very fact that its full implementation became a political objective revealed how difficult some of its parts were to translate into institutional practice. In this sense, the Charter very soon showed signs of premature political ageing, not in its democratic principles, but in the complexity of its institutional architecture.

The fear of power and the weakness of institutions

The trauma of fascism profoundly influenced the institutional architecture designed by the Constituent Assembly. The experience of the concentration of power in the hands of Mussolini led many constituents to prioritise a precise objective: to prevent the emergence of a new strongman. The priority was therefore not to build an efficient executive, but to structurally limit the possibility of the concentration of power.

The result was a system based on a dense network of counterweights: a very strong parliament, a government dependent on parliamentary confidence, a President of the Republic with guarantee functions and a perfect bicameralism, with two chambers with the same legislative powers and the same fiduciary relationship with the executive.

In Europe, however, not everyone drew the same conclusions from the experience of dictatorships. German constitutionalists, reflecting on the failure of the Weimar Republic, came to the opposite diagnosis: not the excessive power of the executive, but the instability of parliamentarism had paved the way for authoritarianism. This is why the German Basic Law of 1949 introduced instruments to stabilise the executive, such as constructive no-confidence, which were absent from the Italian model.

Italian parliamentarianism is therefore not a rationalised parliamentarianism. Government is constantly dependent on parliamentary balances and internal party dynamics. It is not surprising that in the First Republic, Italy experienced more than fifty governments in less than fifty years.

From the perspective of political science, this set-up is characterised by numerous veto players, actors capable of blocking or slowing down the decision-making process. The result is what many scholars have called a democracy of permanent compromise, where the problem emerges when compromise does not produce political synthesis but decision-making immobility.

In this sense, the Italian Constitution often appears as a system designed more to prevent the abuse of power than to effectively organise its exercise.

The Republic of Parties

A second structural element of the Italian constitutional architecture concerns the role of political parties. Article 49 recognises citizens’ right to associate in parties to take part in the determination of national policy, envisioning them as a bridge between civil society and institutions.

In republican practice, however, the parties took on a much larger role, becoming the main centres for selecting the ruling class and the true intermediaries between voters and institutions. As early as the 1940s, the jurist Carlo Costamagna saw the risk that popular sovereignty could be filtered through party structures, paving the way for a form of partyocracy.

The issue concerns the meaning of the ‘democratic method’ in Article 49. The Constitution requires parties to operate democratically in political competition, but remains vague on their internal organisation. In the absence of an implementing law, parties have remained private associations with a great deal of autonomy, although they exercise a decisive influence on the formation of public bodies.

Hence the model defined by many scholars as the Republic of the parties: a system in which Parliament, formally the centre of popular sovereignty, often ends up ratifying balances that have matured within party structures, with the risk – already glimpsed by Calamandrei – that the parties turn into organisational oligarchies capable of compressing the autonomy of elected representatives.

This arrangement affects not only the distribution of power, but also the quality of representation. When the selection of the ruling class depends almost exclusively on party structures, parliament runs the risk of losing part of its original function as a place of confrontation between representatives of the nation, gradually turning into a projection of the internal balances of party organisations.

The paradox of the untouchable Constitution

Despite these critical issues, in Italian public discourse the Constitution continues to be presented as a perfect and immutable text. A representation that contrasts with the very constitutional history of the Republic.

Since 1948, the Constitution has been amended 48 times through constitutional or revision laws. It is therefore not an untouchable document, but a text that has been adapted to new institutional and political needs over time.

Some of these changes were of a technical nature, such as the interventions on the statutes of special statute regions. Others affected central aspects of the institutional set-up. In 1963 a revision set the number of parliamentarians at 630 deputies and 315 senators, overcoming the original system that linked representation to population. In 2001, the reform of Title V profoundly redefined the relations between State and regions, changing the distribution of legislative competences.

Among the most discussed interventions is the 2020 reform, which reduced the number of MPs from 945 to 600. This was a change that directly affected political representation, compressing the ratio between elected representatives and voters and reducing the weight of various territories in national institutions.

The paradox is obvious: the same Constitution that is often described as untouchable has been amended with some regularity throughout republican history. Yet every reform proposal continues to be accompanied by rhetoric evoking alleged ‘attacks on the Constitution’ or authoritarian risks.

This narrative has gradually transformed the Constitution into something more than a symbol. It has become a political totem, an almost sacred object that is invoked in public debate as a source of moral legitimacy rather than as a legal instrument. Defending it thus becomes an identity ritual, while the discussion on its institutional architecture is often reduced to a symbolic clash between alleged defenders of democracy and alleged demolishers of the constitutional order.

The result is that the Constitution ends up being treated more as an object of veneration than of analysis. Its beauty, its original purity, its supposed perfection are extolled, but there is much less discussion of how the institutions it created actually function in contemporary political reality.

And it is precisely here that the rhetoric of the ‘most beautiful constitution in the world’ shows all its ideological nature. It is not a category of constitutional law, nor an assessment of political science. It is a slogan. An identity formula that, over the years, has helped to freeze the debate on institutional reforms and turn the Charter into a sort of civil relic.

But constitutions are not relics. They are instruments for organising political power. And instruments, to continue to function, must be able to be analysed, criticised and, when necessary, modified. Turning the constitution into a sacred object means, paradoxically, betraying the very spirit of the constituents: because a democracy is not defended with the veneration of symbols, but with the courage to discuss its institutions and reform them when they stop working.