At the end of the month, Italy will choose its new President, the successor of Sergio Mattarella. Contrarily to what happens in the US, however, citizens don’t vote for their head of state directly: it’s the Parliament that decides. This is because Italy and the US are two different types of republics: the US is a presidential one, while Italy is a parliamentary one.

The most evident difference between the two is, indeed, the way the president is elected: directly by citizens in presidential republics; by citizens’ representatives in parliamentary ones. Now, considering the varied and often colorful political panorama in the Belpaese, you can imagine electing a new president can become a very complex affair, a game of ideologies, coalitions, and power dynamics, in which we Italians are nothing more than careful spectators.