This essay deals with the long crisis of the Italian parliamentary system and posits that it may undermine representative democracy itself. The study presents an analysis of the events that marked the first two years of the XVIII Italian legislature in order to identify four ways in which parliament itself may be undermined. All of them took place during the last quarter of a century: the attack on the representativeness of the Chambers as well as parliamentarians; the debasement of confidence procedures and the lack of accountability of the Government towards Parliament; the reduction and marginalization of public debate within Parliament; the displacement of the legislative function of the Chambers in favor of the Government. These phenomena should not be considered as mere adaptations or minor changes in the political system. In fact, they question the fundamental principles of parliamentarism and the idea of representative democracy as laid down by the Constitution. This analysis is confirmed by the political events of the XVIII legislature, during which the leaders of the main political forces represented in Parliament predicted the overcoming of the representative principle as a possible outcome to the Italian political crisis. The many attempts to weaken the Parliament stem from the continued loss of value of the Constitutional rules related to the form of government and it also derives from the emerging idea of a democracy meant only to give its consent to rules that come from elsewhere instead of the parliament. This conception degrades representative democracy into a system that merely aims at the appointment of leaders needed to lead the executive branch —understood to be the center of the whole decision-making process— is radically foreign to the paradigm of parliamentarism and it is unable to express a coherent and efficient functioning model of parliamentary form of government. In this context, the strength of the Constitution and the role played by other constitutional bodies have proven to be crucial for the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and for the survival of a representative State as a whole. The Italian context shows how, nowadays, the fate of the representative State depends on the proper functioning of political links between representatives and constituents. It also depends on the possibility
to extend the principles of representative democracy to the organization and the internal procedures of those political and institutional players that have proved to be extraneous to those principles, which instead today appear crucial for the life of the constitutional system.