L’INSTABILITÀ DEL SISTEMA PARLAMENTARE:PATOLOGIA ITALIANA E ANOMALIA SPAGNOLA

European parliamentary democracies have been going through a certain instability that has been rooted in a crisis of the political system, in general, and of the party system, in particular, and has inevitably had repercussions on the relationship between government and parliament. Various variables and contingent factors contributed to this, such as economic crises or emergency situations related to terrorism, environment and health. The convergence of all these factors has fed, both in Italy and abroad, the birth of populisms that have exploited the socio-political crisis to set themselves up as the bastion of democracy, ending up, on the contrary, by undermining its stability. The resulting party fragmentation inevitably reflected on the resilience of governments, parliaments and the balance of their relationship, especially in parliamentary regimes, as can be seen not only in Italian events, but especially in those in Spain, where the transformations of the party system undermined the stable institutional balances that had been characterising the system since its birth. Reflecting in a comparative key, we would like to attempt to highlight the different responses of the two systems to the emergencies and the birth of the new political movements – which in Spain represented an absolute innovation in a system that tended to be bipartisan –, especially from the point of view of the political- institutional balances between government and parliament in the perspective of the parliamentary form of government.