WHAT if Italy were the most stable country in Europe? The notion would once have seemed absurd. But after the Senate’s approval on October 13th of a sweeping constitutional reform, it is less so. The bill, which should have little difficulty passing the lower Chamber of Deputies, removes a feature of the Italian political system that has had reformers gnawing their knuckles in frustration for decades: the two houses of parliament have equal powers. That is why bills so often end up circulating between the chambers until they are neutered or liquidated.

The reform would turn the Senate into a 100-member house of regional and municipal representatives with the power to question, but not veto, legislation. Combined with an electoral law that guarantees a majority to the winning party in the lower house, the reform should mean future Italian governments get five crisis-free years to implement their programmes.

“For us, it is a Copernican revolution,” says Maria Elena Boschi, minister for reform in Matteo Renzi’s left-right coalition. Just as revolutionary as the bill itself is the fact that Mr Renzi entrusted the task of steering it through parliament to Ms Boschi. The 34-year-old lawyer had not even served as a local councillor before her election to parliament.

“I’m not Wonder Woman,” Ms Boschi demurs. Yet her task, as the bill entered its decisive journey through the Senate, might well have daunted even a super-heroine: she had to persuade 315 elected senators, most of them well-versed in parliamentary obstructionism, to vote themselves out of a job. And she had to do so in the teeth of opposition from a minority in Mr Renzi’s own Democratic Party. “Everyone was telling us we didn’t have the numbers, that it was an impossible task,” says Ms Boschi, who speaks with a lawyer’s crystal clarity, while deploying a range of hand gestures expressive even by Italian standards.

The passage of the reform was tempestuous. The right-wing Northern League’s chief whip used an algorithm to table an astonishing 82.7m amendments. Two senators were suspended for miming obscene acts at female opposition members. Most of the bill’s critics left the chamber for the final ballot. In the end the reform was approved by 179 votes to 16. Detractors say it will turn Italy into a democratic dictatorship. Ms Boschi replies that Britain and other countries have similar arrangements, and that prime ministers will be constrained by the extensive powers of Italian presidents and judges.

Arguably, the bill was saved by the defection of a group of lawmakers from Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. Still, its approval was a triumph for its sponsor, and evidence of genuine change in a political environment that until recently was as gerontocratic as it was misogynistic.

Ms Boschi has always said that she wants to be judged by what she achieves—to little avail. The media concentrates less on her talents than on her youth and looks. Yet that may be changing. “Beyond the image, there is substance,” wrote Pierluigi Battista in Corriere della Sera, a newspaper, after the vote. “And the substance is that, with her graceful manners and a smile on her lips, Boschi has hung tough in the trenches.”

The constitutional reform will be put to a referendum next year. And Ms Boschi? Until recently she was saying, even privately, that she had no political ambitions and intended to return to legal practice. But the morning after her triumph she saw things rather differently. “I’m just at the start,” she said. “I hope to be able to lend a hand in the next parliament, too.”