L’effetto sui gruppi di Camera e Senato della rottura tra Azione e Italia Viva, tra asimmetrie (regolamentari) e simmetrie (nella prassi applicativa)

The article analyses the effect on the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the rupture between the political parties of “Azione” and “Italia Viva”, happened in Fall 2023. The consequences of the breakdown of the agreement between the two political parties determined the end of the single parliamentary groups that, both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate, had been formed at the beginning of the nineteenth legislature. The rules on groups have been put to the test following the reduction in the number of parliamentarians and, therefore, above all the new rules on the constitution of groups in the Senate, which between 2017 and 2022 provided for a much more complex discipline on the subject than in the Chamber of Deputies: in both houses of Parliament, the Committees for the Rules of Procedure were involved and in the Senate the solution was found as a result of the mediation of the President of the Assembly, with an arbitral “La Russa award”. The asymmetry in the rules has produced results that are partly different: in the Chamber of Deputies there was the constitution of two parliamentary groups “in derogation” (with the addition of two members, one from the new group and one from the majority, to the Bureau), while in the Senate “Italia Viva” remained as a group and “Azione” was constituted as a political component of the mixed group