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But I think tariffs cannot be imposed on individual countries in the EU. At least that was how I understood the situation with Spain.
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that is also true. Doesn't really stop Trump from threatening to do it all the tim tho.
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Nothing stops that man from saying anything, he himself the least.
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There's quite a few asterisks that need to be appended to "independent".
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It is quite independent in Italy actually. The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.
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I have ancestral Italian Citizenship but have never lived in Italy.

I am occasionally called upon by the local consulate to perform my civic duty and vote.

Just this week I sent them back my ballot, now marked, for this referendum in a sealed envelope.

This referendum required me to dig more deeply than usual into Italian politics before I could decide which way I wanted to vote.

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I am familiar with this but thought it was for separating prosecutors from judges?

Is this some indirect effect of that?

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the current reform is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree on how to vote, but it goes a bit further than separating prosecutors from judges.

Namely, it also changes the self-regulating body (the CSM, Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) of the judiciary so that the government and parliament have a bit more authority and the judiciary have a bit less: the organ is split in two, its judiciary members are no longer elected but picked randomly while a part is decided by the political side, and there's an even higher special tribunal.

Proponents say this is necessary, opponents say this is leading towards stronger power of the political majority over the judiciary.

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> while a part is decided by the political side

Now, roughly one third of CSM members is nominated by the Parliament and the other one is elected by judges, according to the "correnti" (a sort of parties)

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> The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.

Italian here. It's not like that: the referendum is about definitely enforcing the career separation about public persecutor and judges. Actually they are under the same authority and the member of this authority are elected according to a sort of political parties (unique case in the whole EU) and this creates some distortions in career growths and nominations. The new schema will create two different authorities and the members will be selected according to a ballot.

A similar proposal was made by the left wing parties few years ago, when they were at the government

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> It is quite independent in Italy actually.

Ask any Romanian and they'll tell you they're not. Ask them about the Mario Iorgulescu case [1], with the Italian justice system refusing to extradite him here to Romania only because his (wealthy) dad paid the right people off. And Iorgulescu is not the only such case.

[1] https://www.romaniajournal.ro/society-people/law-crime/mario...

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