The effects of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan on Italian institutional structures

This article examines how the implementation of Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has shaped the recent evolution of the Italian form of government, with particular attention to its structural effects on the constitutional functions of the President of the Republic, Parliament and Government. The NRRP is adopted as a privileged analytical lens for two main reasons. First, Next Generation EU represents a turning point in European integration, introducing a more solidaristic approach and partially overcoming the austerity paradigm that characterised the response to the 2008–2012 sovereign debt crisis, notably through an embryonic mutualisation of public debt. Second, it inaugurates a new “method of government”, based on national recovery and resilience plans with a strong performance-oriented logic and a system of conditionality that links financial disbursements to the achievement of targets and milestones, assessed within a continuous and often informal bilateral dialogue between the European Commission and national governments. Against this background, the article first analyses the “European role” of the President of the Republic, highlighting how the supranational dimension of the NRRP has contributed to reshaping presidential functions within the constitutional equilibrium. Secondly, the contribution reconstructs the role that Parliament has sought to assert for itself, despite the central position assigned to the executive in both the drafting and implementation of the NRRP. Particular attention is devoted to the still underexploited potential of parliamentary involvement in public policy evaluation. The analysis adopts a diachronic and comparative perspective to capture the specificity of the current experience. In this regard, it explores the analogies between the present parliamentary debate and earlier discussions on parliamentary oversight of economic governance, notably those surrounding the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Italy after 1948 and the approval of the Economic Development Plan for 1965–69. These debates are also compared with French discussions, beginning in 1958, concerning the structural limits of parliamentary control over economic planning. Finally, the article examines the impact of European integration on the role of the Government by analysing the evolution of NRRP governance. It traces the shift from the initial proposals advanced under the second Conte Government to their institutional consolidation during the Draghi Government, as well as the subsequent adjustments introduced by the Meloni Government. Building on the classic notion of the “disarticulation” of the system of legal sources, the article focuses on the extensive and structurally embedded reliance on decree-laws in the implementation of the NRRP. In this context, the parliamentary conversion of decree-laws emerges as a key arena for integrating the European Commission’s guidance alongside the fulfilment of individual milestones. Overall, the NRRP represents a significant stress test for the Italian constitutional order, challenging its capacity to accommodate a euro-national “method of government” characterised by pronounced verticalisation, stringent temporal constraints and novel forms of financial conditionality. The article ultimately assesses the resilience of the Italian form of government in the face of these potentially transformative pressures emanating from the supranational level.