L'onere della prova dell'insufficienza delle risorse regionali

The idea of full financing inside the clause of art. 119, co. 4, Constitution lays down not only issues of a substantive nature, but also the procedural problem of how to prove that the funding amount is - possibly - insufficient, in the face of a budget that (in equilibrium) assigns a certain spending capacity. The Constitutional Court on this subject seems to have recently overruled its previous orientation in which - for the first time - it had circumvented that "diabolical probation" that traditionally the constitutional case law prefigured to the disadvantage of the regions: precedent that admitted an open and equal investigation phase inside the main constitutional adjudication proceedings, intended to demonstrate the sufficiency or inadequacy of the regional financial capacity. Not confirming this approach the Constitutional Court seems to reiterate a consolidated interpretation, that linked to the so called principle of "overall" budget, which would require the region to demonstrate the impossibility of alternative reallocations by withdrawing resources from the financing of other functions (as a preliminary check, to discuss only consequently the insufficiency of funding in absolute). On this preliminary probative burden the open procedural issues are therefore various, and the article operates a reconstruction of both the theoretical reasons underlying the different reconstructions, and the related practical consequences.