A total of 315 Senate seats are
set to be abolished following the passage on Tuesday of a
landmark Constitutional reform bill ending the Senate's equal
status to the House.
Some 100 local officials will take their places, plus five
nominated by the head of State.
The reform does away with Italy's unusual system of
'perfect bicameralism', but since Italian law requires any
changes to the Constitution be approved by popular referendum,
implementation of the reform is pending confirmation by a vote
in October.
In all, a total of 380 seats are set to be abolished by the
reform, which also does away with the National Council on
Economy and Labour (CNEL), a constitutional organ with 64
councillors plus a president that was based on the 1948
Constitutional Charter.
The number grows even higher when taking into account the
seats linked to provincial governments, which are also abrogated
in the reform.
However, those seats have already been relegated in
elections to what are now known as "second-level institutions",
through the so-called Delrio reform.
The new Senate will be made up of 21 mayors and 74 regional
councillors who won't be given a parliamentary allowance in
addition to their regular salary as local administrators.
The abrogation of CNEL does away with a body that was
designed in 1948 to be a link between civil society and
politics, a role which has become less necessary over the
decades.
CNEL was composed of members with specific qualifications:
"10 experts, qualified exponents of economic, social, and
judicial culture, of whom eight nominated by the President and
two proposed by the Premier"; "48 representatives from
production categories, of whom 22 representatives from civil
service, of whom three representing managers, nine representing
freelance workers and professions and 18 representing
businesses"; and "six representatives from social welfare and
volunteer organisations, of whom, respectively, three designates
from the National Observatory for Associationism and three
designates from the National Observatory for Volunteerism".
The 110 Italian provinces, each of which used to have its
own provincial council and cabinet, have already been
transformed in a transitional way into the "second-level
institutions", made up of a slender executive organism composed
of mayors.
Since the provincial governments were in the Constitution,
however, from the 2001 reform, they still had to be abolished on
paper through the current reform.
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