The law of the Sicilian Region which further deferred the elections of the bodies of the Free Municipal Consortia (corresponding, in Sicily, to the provinces) and of the Metropolitan Councils, extending the commissioner management of the same bodies, violates articles 5 and 114 of the Constitution and is, therefore, constitutionally illegitimate. This was established by the Constitutional Court in sentence no. 172, filed today, with which it deemed the questions of constitutional legitimacy raised by the TAR of the Sicilian Region to be founded.
The Municipality of Enna had appealed to the TAR four decrees of the President of the Region appointing and extending the extraordinary commissioners for the Free Municipal Consortium of Enna. The TAR found that the first three decrees had been adopted on the basis of law no. 26 of 2022, which had extended the elections for the sixteenth time, but had already been declared unconstitutional with sentence no. 136 of 2023. The last decree was based on law no. 6 of 2023, promulgated the day before the filing of sentence no. 136 of 2023, which had ordered the seventeenth postponement. Consequently, the TAR sent the documents to the Constitutional Court, requesting that this latest referral also be declared unconstitutional.
The Court considered the question well founded, recalling the principles already expressed in the previous sentence no. 136 of 2024, in which he had urged the Sicilian Region to remedy this situation without further delay, through the timely holding of elections. The Court once again underlined how the continuous postponements of the elections, which have taken place since 2015, have so far prevented the establishment of large area bodies in Sicily, extending commissioner managements incompatible with their nature as autonomous and constitutionally necessary territorial bodies.