Abstract
Public budgeting fulfils not simply a priority, but the priority of national governments. In a rapidly changing and globalised context, tied by permanent austerity and shaken by continuous crises, it has a vital role, while being extremely complex and difficult to manage. At the same time, a well-designed long-term budgetary plan is unavoidable to grant people the necessary resources to live and prevent new, domestic and external, shocks. The budget systematises the policy priorities of the government while ensuring the parliament’s function of supervision. It also mirrors the incessant historical and social struggle that tries to divest representative institutions of their decisional powers in favour of the market. This chapter illustrates first the importance of public budgeting for a country’s life. Then, the Italian case is presented as a relevant case study for understanding and interpreting not only budget changes but also recent innovations of European parliamentary democracies.
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Notes
- 1.
Let us consider for instance the COVID-19 pandemic (which started in 2020) and the subsequent economic downturn, only a decade after the Great Recession (2007–2009) and a few years after the recovery from the Eurozone crisis (2009–2014); the outbreak of the war in Ukraine (started in 2022) that is involving the ‘external’ contribution of all Western democracies meanwhile facing the oil and energy crisis, the consequent food crisis in many countries around the world, in a context of an increasingly severe climatic crisis. If ‘adversity’ was the key concept of the 1990s (Rosenthal and Kouzmin 1997), these years will probably be remembered as the crisis decade.
- 2.
For instance, the first government in Western democracies composed solely of populist parties (Five Star Movement [M5S] and League), Conte I (2018–2019). M5S succeeded in entering parliament in 2013, creating a new tripolar competition, by presenting itself as ‘outside’ from the usual left-right political divide (Ceccarini and Bordignon 2016) and surfing on its noninvolvement into institutional party dynamics, as an archetypical example of a challenger party (Hobolt and Tilley 2016). Conte I is the first government with the M5S, formed after its success at the 2018 polls with the League, after the signature of aformal agreement called ‘Contract for a government of change’ (Contratto per il governo del cambiamento). The League transitioned from ethnoregionalism to state-wide nationalism (Albertazzi et al. 2018), and eventually transformed into a populist radical-right party (Tarchi 2018). In 2018, it was the most popular and successful radical-right party in Western Europe (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018). Today, Italy is governed by a right-wing coalition led by Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia, FDI)—a radical-right party which was the most voted party at the Italian 2022 elections—and its leader, Giorgia Meloni, who was part of the youth organisation of Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI), the main Italian extreme right party at the time (Ignazi 1998). In October 2022, with the beginning of the XIX legislative term, Giorgia Meloni became the first woman Prime Minister in Italy; however, the period analysed in this book had only men serving as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. This is the unique reason why, throughout the book, I refer to these roles using the masculine.
- 3.
Already in the 1990s Silvio Berlusconi criticised how Italy had accepted the single currency ‘in a closed box’ (Berlusconi 2000: 53; cited in Pasquinucci 2016). Similarly, the leader of the Communist Refoundation Party (Rifondazione Comunista, PRC) asked to start a discussion about revision of the Maastricht convergence parameters.
- 4.
It is important to warn the reader who is not familiar with Italian politics that Italy did not change its Constitution in the passage between the First (1948–1991), Second (1992–2012) and Third (2013–present) Republic. In fact, these are mainly journalistic terms used to differentiate the path of the Italian republican history that in many cases scholars refrain from using as they are inaccurate. In addition, we need to also point out that the main features of the Third Republic are not yet well-defined and sometimes a little controversial. However, as their use is widespread, and these periods are also related to important innovations of the budgetary process that are obviously linked to the rearrangement that occurred during those turning points, I choose to adopt the labels in the book, also helping the reader’s comprehension.
- 5.
After the polls of 25 September 2022, a new legislative term (XIX) began, with the instalment of a new parliament after a Constitutional reform that saw a reduction from 945 to 600 representatives, and of a new government led by the first woman to become Prime Minister in Italy (Giorgia Meloni).
- 6.
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Cavalieri, A. (2023). Introduction. In: Italian Budgeting Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15447-8_1
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