Abstract (in inglese)
What would happen within the Italian legal order if a party or movement, organised rather than merely ideological, emerged with the aim of subverting the democratic order? And does such subversion now rely on means different from those of the past, such as to require an updating of the existing system of safeguards?
These questions, only apparently hypothetical, require us to assess whether the Italian Constitution and current legislation already provide adequate tools to confront anti-system phenomena without relying solely on political or conventional remedies. The article therefore reconstructs, in its first part, the network of protections available in the Italian system against anti-constitutional threats. Although fragmented, this network is not insignificant: it is primarily grounded in Articles 18 and 49 of the Constitution, the XII Transitional and Final Provision, the Scelba and Mancino laws, the political-associative offences contained in the Criminal Code, anti-terrorism legislation, and Law No. 124 of 2007 on intelligence services.
This framework, however, lacks a specialised body for constitutional protection, unlike, for example, the German model of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Starting from the paradigm of streitbare Demokratie and its operational categories, the essay analyses the nature, functions and limits of the German Federal Office and proposes a selective, constitutionally compatible transposition into the Italian context.
In particular, the creation of a specialised unit within AISI (the Italian Internal Secret Service), subject to reinforced oversight and entrusted with detecting and assessing organised threats against the democratic order, appears to be a hypothesis worth exploring. The use of intelligence as a formal instrument of constitutional protection would also respond to the structural transformation of threats to liberal democracy, which are no longer always immediately visible. This is the case, for instance, with cognitive warfare conducted by foreign powers hostile to Europe, exploiting the opacity of the digital information environment to distort democratic dynamics.
One possible legislative option would also be to enhance the role of the Supreme Defence Council, in order to overcome the need to distinguish too rigidly between actions falling within the competence of the Ministry of Defence and those entrusted to the intelligence services under the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.