Two years of the Meloni government, here are all the numbers: 2 manoeuvres with the third one on the way, 74 decrees and 67 armour plating

Honouring the beginning of the government's third year in office will in fact be the manoeuvre cake, stuffed with the confirmation of the wedge cut and the plan on the Irpef tax rates, but not without indigestible ingredients, at least to part of the majority, such as the massive cuts in ministerial spending. And the one that will materialise after the presentation of the budget programme document will be the third Meloni-Giorgetti budget law, in the wake of the first two passed in the first 24 months of activity of the executive, which has been in office since 22 October 2022. In these two years of activity, in addition to the public finance measures, the justice package, the security bill, the tax delegation, the reforms with the premierate, still halfway through, and differentiated autonomy, awaiting full implementation and with the spectre of a referendum on the horizon, have passed along the parliamentary route. But there are also measures to counter immigration and to deal with various emergencies: from the floods to the fallout of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In short, it is a variegated range of rules and provisions that appears in the approximately 300 legislative measures (298 at the end of September) adopted by the Meloni government in its first two years. A not inconsiderable amount of measures that often flowed into the many decree-laws (74) that sprung from Palazzo Chigi, not without criticism from the opposition but also from the Chamber of Deputies for the excessive use of the instrument of urgent decrees.

The most recent monitoring by the Prime Minister's Office shows that from 22 October 2022 to 30 September 2024, 72 decree-laws (24% of all 'approved' measures) had been passed in the 97 meetings of the Council of Ministers, in addition to 104 legislative decrees (35%) and 122 bills (41%). In the meantime, the number of meetings of the Council of Ministers rose to 99 and the number of decree-laws further increased to 74.

Of this flood of regulations, 63% of the texts concerned specific sector policies, 18% were related to transpositions of European legislation and the remaining 19% were ratifications of international treaties. Palazzo Chigi points out that in 85% of the cases, the measures approved touched on eight points of the government's programme, starting with "for a fair taxation system" (56 texts, equal to 19.2%) and institutional, justice and public administration reforms according to the Constitution (47 measures, 16.2%). On security and the fight against illegal immigration, 37 measures (or 12.7%) were concentrated on 30 September, one step below 'Italy, fully part of Europe, the Atlantic Alliance and the West'. As for decree-laws alone, on 30 September 61 had been converted into law, 7 had been repealed and merged into other measures and 4 were awaiting conversion.

In the crosshairs of the oppositions, not only the frequent recourse to Dl's, but also the 'armour-plating' of measures has ended up. The latest OpenPolis survey shows that in 24 months the Meloni executive has made use of the question of confidence on 67 occasions, preceded only by the Renzi cabinet, which has posed 68 but in a much longer time span (33 months) and followed by the Draghi (55) and Monti (51) executives. Also according to OpenPolis, on average, the current government has used the tool of the armoury 2.72 times a month, second only to the Monti executive (2.79).

The Meloni government is stepping up its efforts to dispose of the enormous flow of implementing decrees, which is also fuelled by the requirements introduced by parliament. Suffice it to say that as many as 40 of the 105 implementing measures that have sprung up in the last three months come from rules introduced during the conversion process of decree-laws in parliament. In all, the government still has to adopt 521 texts (including those inherited from the executives of the last legislature), but since it took office it has already disposed of no less than 642, giving, among other things, absolute priority to self-implementing regulations. With this strategy, Palazzo Chigi claims to have freed up resources for the three-year period 2022-24 amounting to "over 182 billion, of which: 173.6 billion referable to the current legislature and 8.3 billion released through the adoption of the implementing measures referring to the 18th legislature".