Eighty Years On, a Republic Still Explaining Itself

On Tuesday, Rome staged the ceremonies that mark the Festa della Repubblica — the eightieth anniversary of the June 1946 referendum in which Italians chose a republic over a monarchy and, in the same act, began drafting the constitution that still governs them. Euronews carried the images: the parade along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the flypasts, the formal solemnity that the Italian state performs with evident care on this date each year. For a foreign audience, the pictures are legible and reassuring — a mature democracy marking its own birth with the measured confidence of a country that knows where it came from.

Yet the international press, when it looks more carefully, has always found a more complicated inheritance. The Republic was born from the ruins of fascism and a lost war, and its constitution was written in deliberate reaction to what had preceded it — a document of restraints, of distributed power, of rights enumerated with the anxiety of people who had seen rights extinguished. That origin is not merely historical. It explains why Italian governments are structurally weak by design, why the judiciary is constitutionally independent to a degree that generates constant friction, and why the very word 'reform' carries in Italy a weight it does not carry elsewhere. Foreign correspondents who have spent time in Rome tend to understand this; those filing from a distance often do not.

What eighty years have produced is a state that has outlasted fifty-odd governments, absorbed the shock of terrorism, survived financial crises and a pandemic, and yet is routinely described abroad as ungovernable. We would suggest that the description mistakes the symptom for the diagnosis. A republic designed to prevent the concentration of power will always appear, from outside, to be in a state of managed disorder. The parade on Tuesday was not a performance of triumphalism. It was something quieter: a country acknowledging that the arrangement it chose in 1946, imperfect and contentious as it remains, has held.