Reform set to remove 315 Senate seats

(ANSA) - Rome, April 13 - 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.