Changes in the form of government and the crisis of "coherence." The "aporias" of the election of the Prime Minister

Abstract

The article examines the proposal to introduce the direct election of the Prime Minister within the Italian constitutional system, adopting «coherence» as a structural parameter and criterion that, within a framework composed of norms of equal rank, makes it possible to distinguish legitimate constitutional changes from those (illegitimately) disharmonic. Starting from a historical reconstruction that identifies the Albertine Statute as a paradigmatic case of incoherence and the Republican Constitution as a matrix of equilibrating rationalisation, the analysis seeks to demonstrate how direct popular investiture produces «functional aporias» that cannot be remedied through interpretation, with coherence standing as a clause of institutional continuity