At issue was a sweeping redesign of the 1948 constitution, plans drawn up by Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition without consulting the Left and voted through parliament during its final months in office. Denounced by the Prodi Government as an anti-democratic “insult” — hypocritically, since in 2001 the centre Left wrote its own changes to the constitution on an equally partisan basis — the reform had to be put to a referendum after failing to win a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Voters were asked to approve changes to more than 50 of the constitution’s 139 articles. This was no subtle shift, more like chucking a rock into a stagnant pond. Its purpose is to change not only the constitutional balance of power but the whole culture of Italian politics.

That culture is rooted in the uneasy collective memory of fascism and a still more deeply rooted distrust of power. The 1948 constitution carries constraints on the exercise of political power to such extremes that it makes a nonsense of the whole concept of a “mandate to govern”.

In Italy, a prime minister is not really a prime minister. Winning an election does not automatically get him the job, and it is not much of a job either, since he may not set government policy, but only co-ordinate its work. He may not even pick his Cabinet without reference to the president and he cannot sack rebellious or incompetent ministers; he can only present the resignation of the entire government and hope that the President asks him to form a new one with a changed cast. He cannot dissolve parliament; that too is the president’s sole prerogative.

No matter how strong the majority — and in Italy, which has endured 61 shifting government coalitions since the War, strong majorities are rare — that is no guarantee that the government can carry out its programme. Italy’s “perfect bicameralism” gives the Senate and Chamber of Deputies equal powers, with the result that laws bounce back and forward between the two for months or years on end. To make bad worse, a botched centre-left reform in 2001 devolved extensive powers to Italy’s 20 regions without clarifying who is responsible for what, the regions or the central government, which foots the bills, and without giving the centre power to block regional laws in the national interest.

These extreme checks and balances reflect the determination, in 1948, to ensure that no leader could abuse power as Mussolini had done. But they make Italy close to ungovernable. In essence, the Berlusconi reform would have given an Italian prime minister powers resembling those in Britain, changed the Senate into a regional body resembling the German Bundesrat, and clarified the relationship between the centre and the regions. Not exactly draconian; yet six out of ten voters gave it the thumbs down.

Why did they do it? No one has a good word for the way Italy is run, or rather not run. Everyone, from toddler to pensioner, shopkeeper to tycoon, pays a price for the near-impossibility of getting laws on to, or off, the statute books, for the constant tussles between the centre and Italy’s power-hungry regions, and for the Byzantine complexity of a system designed to keep governments weak and unstable. Everyone pays, most people would add, except the amply remunerated politicians at the apex of a pyramid of patronage so vast that it pays the salaries of an unbelievable 450,000 Italians. The one universally popular item in the Berlusconi reform was the commitment to trim the exorbitant political bill by cutting membership in the lower house from 630 to 518 and removing 53 of the Senate’s 315 seats.

This referendum asked an awful lot of a single yes-no vote. It was never likely that most people would get to grips with the detail. Italy’s media are not much help at times like these; you find comment ad nauseam, but look almost in vain for neutral summaries of key points. Yet people did understand how much was at stake. Last weekend was hotter than Hades, the World Cup was on, this was their third round of voting in 11 weeks; yet 54 per cent headed for the booths.

Fear contributed. Fear in the poorer regions that they would lose out from devolution (they already have); fear of shoring up the separatist agenda of the poisonous Lega Nord. Hatred counted; in Italy’s red belt, it was a case of sticking more pins into the Berlusconi effigy; this time he may die of his voodoo injuries. Illusion triumphed; the illusion, fed by the Left, that Italians could afford to “vote no for a better reform”, and wait.

They will wait a long time. This is a stunning blow to the centre Right; if it fragments, that would dissolve the only glue — fear of fresh elections — that holds the Left together. Romano Prodi may end up more, not less, the prisoner of radicals fanatically opposed to reform. Three bipartisan constitutional commissions, one in the Eighties and two in the Nineties, bit the dust. Reform is, at bottom, not what most politicians want. The turkeys voted for Christmas once. The miracle is unlikely to recur.

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