The DOMANI – Motus Liberi movement has taken legal action against Michela Pelliccioni, who left the party on 16 July 2025 and remained in the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale) as an independent, seeking damages of up to €50,000 under Article 24 of the party’s own statute, which requires anyone who abandons the parliamentary group to also relinquish their seat.
The writ of summons was filed on 11 June 2026 — civil case 241/2026 — with the first hearing set for 24 September. On 25 August, the Councillor wrote to the Captains Regent and the Bureau of the Council (Ufficio di Presidenza) asking the State to cover her legal defence, with an indemnity of no less than €50,000; the Bureau postponed its decision.
Let’s try a simple thought experiment. Imagine someone offered a Councillor fifty thousand euros to join a group and stay in it. What would we call that? No lawyer is needed to answer.
Now flip the scenario. A Councillor leaves, believing the party’s line has become incompatible with the mandate she was elected to carry out. She stays in the Chamber as an independent. And the party sends her a bill: fifty thousand euros. In the first case, the money precedes the choice and buys it. In the second, it comes afterward and punishes it. In the first there is an offer; in the second, a demand. Readers can draw their own conclusions — we merely wish to pose the question.
The movement’s argument is well known and has its own internal logic: the statute is a contract, whoever joins accepts it, and the damage is concrete — public funding tied to the seat, roughly €28,000 between 2025 and 2026, which went to the independent Councillor instead of the party, plus the loss of opportunities on projects left unrealized. There is also a detail the other side will not fail to point out: Pelliccioni was present at the assembly of 31 May 2022 when that clause was introduced and, according to the record, voted in favour of it.
All true. And all irrelevant to the real issue. Because what is at stake is not private property: it is a seat assigned by voters, not by the party that drew up the list. The movement itself seems to acknowledge this, since it is not asking the court to declare the seat vacant. It knows it cannot obtain that. It asks for money instead. We won’t take your seat — we’ll send you the bill.
The principle at stake here predates any statute. Article 67 of the Italian Constitution establishes that every member of parliament exercises their functions without a binding mandate. Article 27 of the French Constitution declares any imperative mandate null and void. Article 67.2 of the Spanish Constitution excludes it outright, and Spain’s Constitutional Court, as far back as 1983, reached precisely the same conclusion now at issue in San Marino: any mechanism obliging an elected official to surrender their seat whenever the party demands it is unlawful. San Marino has no charter that expressly addresses the matter — the Declaration of Citizens’ Rights (Dichiarazione dei Diritti) is silent on it — and in that silence, everyone reads what suits them.
But the silence of the law is not an authorization. If a private statute can put a price on an elected official’s departure, that price will be paid by those who cannot afford it: freedom of mandate ceases to be a right and becomes a luxury. And a dispute that is fundamentally political ends up in the hands of ordinary justice, asked to decide something that should remain a matter for the Chamber and for voters.
This is why the Pelliccioni case is not about one Councillor alone. It concerns all sixty seats, and whoever will occupy them in the future. The Court will rule on the contract — that is its job. But judgment on the underlying principle cannot be outsourced. And there is only one principle: an elected official’s vote has no price tag. Not to buy it, and not to reclaim it.
