In Italy, minister reiterates plan for constitutional change for direct election of the prime minister

The government is not prepared to abandon its plans to change the Constitution to introduce the direct election of the premier by the Italian people, Reform Minister Maria Elisabetta Casellati told ANSA [...]/ "We are prepared to intervene on the technical aspects of the proposal in order to improve them," she said after a hearing on the constitutional reform bill introducing the premiership before the Senate's Constitutional Affairs Commission. "What we cannot abandon is direct election, because the premiership already represents a mediation given that we started from (the idea of introducing) a presidential system" of government, added Casellati. Leading Constitutional experts Sabino Cassese and Antonio Baldassarre have called on the government to abandon its plans to introduce the direct election of the premier and begin a process of constitutional reform that is shared by the opposition. [...] The centre-left opposition Democratic Party (PD) has slammed the proposed reform as "dangerous", saying that it "weakens parliament and the prerogatives of the President of the Republic", PD Secretary Elly Schlein described it as "a distortion of the Constitution and the parliamentary Republic". "We will use every available dialectical tool in parliament to oppose a project that we consider to be dangerous," she continued.
Read the full article here: https://perma.cc/WYP9-EFN2