When political power abdicates to the judiciary

Modern constitutions are built on a wise distrust that runs through Montesquieu’s logic. Power must check power. No power should become so strong that it cannot be limited by another.

What we are witnessing today in the conflict between the judiciary and the executive is not the first episode, but a periodic display of a judicial corporatism that, more than a crisis of justice, evidences a crisis of political power. It is the failure of political institutions to fulfill the constitutional duty of preserving the balance between powers. It is a failure of Parliament, of the majority and the opposition together, because when the foundations of the state are discussed, day-to-day politics must fall silent.

Certainly, the greatest weight lies with the majority, of which I too am part. The majority does not only have the right to govern; it has the obligation to defend the constitutional order, to exercise the power entrusted to it, and not to create a constitutional vacuum.

This vacuum has gradually begun to be filled by our justice system. From a power that was supposed to be independent of politics, it is turning into a power that claims independence from any check and counterweight — even from the Constitution itself.

Today we have reached the point where the instruments the Republic gave to justice to serve citizens — lawsuits, security measures, criminal complaints and criminal proceedings — are being used in a coordinated, institutional manner, accompanied by public and media pressure, for a conflict directly tied to the private economic interests of the members of this power. When a power, in order to impose its members’ interest on another power, uses the force the Republic gave it to serve citizens, we have entered the territory of an institutional “vigilantism” that strikes the constitutional order itself with a “fist”.

So why have we arrived here? Because political power — out of fear, interest, circumstance, weakness or inability — has allowed it, risking the surrender of the power citizens entrusted to it by vote and by Constitution. This surrender weakens the citizen and democracy itself, risking overturning the parliamentary Republic into a judicial Republic.

I have said it before: government is voted regularly, but increasingly the country is being governed by the judiciary. Political power has been placed under fear of judicial power and does not use the constitutional instruments to defend the competences citizens have entrusted to it.

This is not simply an abdication of political power to the judiciary, but of the vote itself — of the power of citizens to decide who runs this country.