Meloni wanted to tame Italy’s prosecutors. She may end up empowering them instead

On 22 and 23 March, Italians will vote in a referendum intended to curb the power of the country’s prosecutors. But the reform championed by prime minister Giorgia Meloni could produce the opposite effect, giving prosecutors even greater control over Italy’s justice system.

The referendum concerns the bodies that govern magistrates’ careers and discipline and introduces formal separation between judges and public prosecutors.

It is a flagship reform that Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longtime prime minister, attempted repeatedly but never managed to pass. Its roots lie in the trauma of Mani Pulite, the ‘Clean Hands’ investigations of the early 1990s that drove a former prime minister into exile and wiped out the political parties that had governed Italy for nearly half a century.

Meloni’s rightwing government has repeatedly accused the judiciary of acting as an arm of the left and of obstructing the government for partisan reasons — for example, in court rulings on the detention of irregular migrants in an Italian-run centre in Albania.

In November 2024, Elon Musk weighed in on the dispute, posting on X: “These judges need to go”.

Meloni’s government has already moved to curb some of the judiciary’s investigative powers: it has curtailed the use of wiretaps, limited officials’ liability for financial damage to the state, abolished the crime of abuse of office, relaxed rules against influence peddling, and even floated the idea of requiring advance notice before police searches.

Quoting other magistrates, the secretary for justice described the judiciary’s governing council as “a quasi-mafia-like mechanism.”

His chief of staff went further in a public debate, saying that with the reform, “we’ll get rid of the magistrates, who act like firing squads”.

The intent behind this reform was to limit the powers of public prosecutors, whom the government considers to be largely free from any form of oversight. In the post-Fascist constitution, Italy granted wide autonomy to the judiciary and even more to public prosecutors.

Over time, that autonomy has also meant a troubling lack of accountability when grave judicial errors occur or investigations are mishandled.

Between 2013 and 2023, more than 643,000criminal cases expired during the investigative phase, before a trial even began. That leaves prosecutors with enormous discretion in deciding which cases to pursue and which to quietly let lapse.

Promotions and pay-rises

Career oversight has been no stricter.

Over the past decade, 99percentof magistrates received promotions and salary increases. The High Council of the Judiciary issued favourable evaluations — even for judges who forgot a defendant in prison for nearly a year beyond the legal limit of detention, or who took almost four years to write a verdict.

Inside the judiciary, organised factions have emerged that resemble political parties. For decades, the centre-left has enjoyed what Antonio Gramsci once called “cultural hegemony” within the magistracy, almost always winning internal elections.

Public confidence has eroded accordingly.

The share of Italians who say they trust the judiciary has fallen from about 70 percent in 1994 to roughly 45 percent in 2023.

Open goal or own goal?

For Meloni, a referendum on the courts seemed like an open goal. Yet the reform may produce the opposite of what she intends: handing greater power to the very prosecutors her government wants to curb.

Under the new system, prosecutors would effectively decide among themselves who leads the nation’s prosecution offices. Today, they must negotiate those appointments with judges, where they are in the minority — a balance that many legal scholars say has helped restrain prosecutorial excess.

Judges, meanwhile, would no longer hold a clear majority in the disciplinary court and would lose the ability to appeal sanctions to another body, as they can today.

Once the traditional solidarity between judges and prosecutors disappears — the two roles would be fully separated — prosecutors could open investigations into judges, potentially pressuring them to endorse requests for convictions.

Regardless of its composition, the disciplinary court risks becoming little more than an empty shell. While the reform establishes such a body under Article 105 of the Constitution, Article 107 would still reserve the most severe sanctions (dismissal, suspension and compulsory transfer) to the separate governing bodies of judges and prosecutors. In practice, this would further entrench prosecutors’ control over their own internal discipline.

Tick the ‘too difficult’ box?

Nor would the reform cure the ailments it claims to address. It would mandate the use of sortition to select members of both the disciplinary court and the governing bodies of the magistracy.

In Italy, random selection has been used for years to form committees that assign positions in hospitals and universities. In more than a few cases, those committees have simply rubber-stamped decisions made informally elsewhere, by outside power brokers.

The number of pending cases in Italy would likely continue to hover around one million. Only four percent of magistrates changed functions between 2014 and 2024.

Even if voters approve the reform, the clash between politics and the judiciary is unlikely to disappear. In a country like Italy — where the boundaries between powers are often blurred and members of parliament no longer enjoy immunity from prosecution — tension between elected officials and magistrates is almost built into the system.

Italy, after all, has a long tradition of such confrontations.

In 1991, Italy’s president at the time even sent a riot squad to block a meeting of the judiciary’s governing council.

In that sense, the referendum may not settle the conflict between politics and the courts. It may only rearrange the battlefield.

Originally published at https://euobserver.com on March 19, 2026.