The Italian Constitutional Court. A Powerful Political Institution

Looking at the history of Italy, the politics of constitutional review is quite a novelty. After World War II, the creation of the Italian Constitutional Court (ICC) marked a turning point in the Italian political-legal tradition, representing an institution at the intersection of the constituent power, form of government and system of constitutional guarantees (Fioravanti 2014). The Italian Constitution, which came into force on 1 January 1948, established the Italian Constitutional Court as an institutional arbiter intended to safeguard the relations between government branches and ensure a coherent and smoothly evolving interpretation of the Constitution. At the same time, it represented one of the most controversial decisions in the construction of the postwar Republic, so that after the adoption of the Constitution in 1948, the Court did not begin its work until April 1956 (Rodotà 1999). Since then, the ICC has become an increasingly important player in Italian politics. Indeed, in recent decades the country has witnessed an institutional rise of the judiciary and of the Constitutional Court in particular (Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2020; Pederzoli 2008; Volcansek 1999; De Mucci 1996). Beginning in the early 1990s, the expansion of judicial power represented “the most symbolic effect of the crisis of electoral democracy as a procedure and system for resolving conflict”(Calise 1998, 121). In times of fragile political institutions and political instability, it has been observed that the Constitutional Court has increasingly been able to influence policy-making and to engage with the Italian political system (Musella and Rullo 2023).