Throughout this book, I have maintained that populism and constitutionalism, and in particular post–WWII constitutionalism (of which Italy is a prime example, as seen in Chapter 2) cannot be reconciled, due to the exclusionary, holistic and majoritarian nature of populism. As we saw in Chapter 1, this does not mean that populism and constitutionalism cannot have something in common, namely the importance of emotional reactions and the distrust of political power.

In this chapter, I shall undertake an in-depth analysis of how in-office Italian populists understand parliaments. Before going into the technicalities of constitutional law however, it is necessary to frame the issue in a broader perspective and mention the kind of politics that the Five Star Movement has in mind.

Although Emmanuel Sieyès is often read as a theorist of sovereignty, I argue that he theorised constituent power as a way of framing the principle of popular power alternative to ideas of both national and popular sovereignty. In his view, both versions of sovereignty attributed unlimited and absolute power to either the representatives in parliament (national sovereignty) or the multitude (popular sovereignty) and resulted, respectively, in legislative blockages or re-totale. Sieyès introduced his theory of constituent power to avoid both outcomes. Constituent power allowed him to claim that political authority resided in the people but was limited to the authorisation of the constitution-writing process, as carried out by elected representatives. Once the constitution entered into force, the people’s constituent power would retreat and make space for the constituted order, run by representative institutions. Yet these only had a limited power, as they could only act within the limits imposed by the people when authorising the constitution. The outcome of this theoretical construction is a constitutional representative government where the people who hold the original constituent power exercise it only indirectly (contra popular sovereignty), while the delegates who hold a derived constituted power exercise it only within limits (contra national sovereignty).