Effetti (normativi) e difetti (culturali) nella costituzionalizzazione dell’equilibrio di bilancio

(NORMATIVE) EFFECTS AND (CULTURAL) DEFECTS IN THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE BALANCED BUDGET RULE. The article deals with the constitutionalisation of the budgetary balance rule in the Ital-ian legal system, contextualizing it within the scope of a loyal cooperation. The balanced budget prin-ciple – pre-existing to 2012 – plays a new important role in the European integration, similar to the function of a financial loyalty in the federative processes (in particular, with regard to the German ex-perience). Reconstructing the regulatory framework and the evolution of the European financial con-vergence discipline – both in the experience of the Stability and Growth Pact and during the Eurozone crisis – the analysis continues focusing on the innovations that the transposition of the European an-ticrisis measures have determined in the national system. The focus is on the effects of a budgetary law no longer merely formal and on the prospect of weakening the safeguard clauses, to highlight how the tendency to downsize the role of politics with respect to accounting techniques must be relativized. The main theme of the analysis is the question of how the European way of understanding budget bal-ance changes the national paradigms in the field of public accounting, introducing logics that highlight how equilibrium is to be achieved both in a “dynamic” way and on the basis of decisions that are not to be “technically necessary” but – rather – “politically responsible” (overcoming the traditional Italian cultural approach, of a public accounting made “on the margin” and ex ante).