Volume 21 | 2026

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Tancredi’s celebrated maxim in The Leopard has long served as the master key to Italian politics: a country where every rupture seems to dissolve into continuity, every revolution into restoration. But does the formula still hold? Since October 2022, Italy has been governed by the first executive in the history of the Republic led by a party with roots in the post-fascist tradition — an experiment watched with alarm, curiosity and hope across Europe and beyond. Three years on, the balance sheet confounds both the catastrophists and the reassured. The most stable government in decades has completed none of the institutional reforms it promised; yet Italian democracy has quietly shifted — in the governance of dissent, the control of public media, the externalisation of migration, the symbolic politics of culture and memory. Drawing on original survey research and in-depth analyses of foreign policy, environmental commitments, protest and cultural institutions, this volume charts the transformation of Italian democracy within a world in disorder: multiplying wars, a deepening global democratic recession, a transatlantic alliance in turmoil. Its thesis is captured in a single formula: hybrid Italy — a democracy in which institutional continuity and illiberal drift coexist, and in which Tancredi’s maxim now runs in reverse. Everything stays the same, precisely so that things can change. A book for anyone seeking to understand not only where Italy is going, but what its ‘laboratory’ reveals about the future of democracy in Europe. Damiano Palano is Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. He is Director of ASERI (Graduate School of Economics and International Relations) and Polidemos (Centre for the Study of Democracy and Political Change). For ASERI, he is also Director of the Master in Advanced Global Studies and Director for the Master in Advanced Public and Cultural Diplomacy for International Relations. His research focuses on democratic theory, populism and the transformations of contemporary political orders.