You have seen the solemn pageantry of the referendum, the people summoned to the ballot boxes to pronounce upon the judiciary. You have not yet looked for the citizen who will answer not with a vote, but with silence - his voice already softened by the long erosion of legal uncertainty, his rights already reshaped by laws that bend not to justice, but to political convenience. Let us follow the money - and the power - a little further, and introduce the person who has been left out of the account.

The government, we are told, seeks reform to make the courts swifter, cleaner, more accountable. A noble aim. The judges, on the other hand, resist, defending their independence like sentinels at the gate. The Prime Minister stands at the center, presenting the referendum as a sacred test of public trust. All very dramatic. All very visible.

But who is the unseen? Not the politician cheered at rallies, nor the magistrate fortified behind robes and rulings. The unseen is the shopkeeper in Bologna who cannot enforce a contract because the appeal drags on for ten years. The widow in Palermo who waits decades to inherit her home, while lawyers feast on fees and judges shuffle papers. The young lawyer in Naples who abandons the bar not for lack of zeal, but because the system rewards connections more than competence.

Let us follow the consequences. Suppose the reform passes. New mechanisms are introduced - faster dismissals, reallocated powers, political oversight of appointments. Jobs are created in the administrative branches of justice, new offices opened, new salaries paid. The government points to these and says: See? Progress! But what of the magistrate who now fears to rule against the state, knowing his tenure depends on favor? What of the litigant who suspects the court is no longer a scale, but a tool?

And if the reform fails? Then the judges retain their autonomy, but also their inertia. The courts remain slow, impenetrable, self-perpetuating. The people lose again - not from interference, but from absence. Justice delayed is justice denied, and no referendum can disguise that arithmetic.

The real question is not whether the state should control the judges, or the judges defy the state. It is whether justice can survive when both are players in the same political game. When the law becomes a weapon or a shield for whichever side holds power, the loser is always the same: the ordinary soul who believed, foolishly, that right and wrong would be judged on their merits.

So let us not speak of confidence in government, but of confidence in justice. Not of winning referendums, but of restoring a system where no citizen must ask, before entering a courtroom: Which side am I on - and who owes favors to whom?

The ballot will record a vote. But somewhere, in a dimly lit chamber or a cluttered solicitor’s office, a case is being postponed. That delay - that quiet injustice - that is the true result. Have you considered it?