Episodi e momenti del conflitto Stato-regioni nella gestione della epidemia da COVID-19

The spread of the new Coronavirus in the spring of 2020 upended nearly every aspect of public law as we know it. Day after day, the emergency generated by the COVID-19 infection has taken on the appearance of a “perfect storm”. Few people imagined the physical impact of the current epidemic for law, yet SARS-Cov-2 is a “sovereign” virus, as someone has called it. Against this backdrop, this paper intends to take into consideration what happened on the side of relations between state and regions in Italy. The health emergency represented a justification to build an unprecedented structure of relations between State and regions, whose formation is still in progress while writing. There has been a gradual emergence of a new architecture of institutional powers – away from the constitutional configuration of center-periphery relations – for the sake of the rapid and effective solution of problems related to the pandemic. This situation has produced new conflicts among state, regional and municipal powers. The paper is divided in two parts. The first is dedicated to give an overview of the situation and to describe the evolution of legislation from the point of view of “loyal collaboration.” The second is devoted to examine three distinctive episodes of the state-regions conflict that have had an epigone before Italian administrative judges. The work ends with an insight into the fate of Italian regionalism after the COVID-19 emergency.