P2 Commission; what consequences of a cryptocracy

If democracy is a system of rules and procedures which define the parameters within which political action can take place, what happens when alongside this system there is another one whose rules are mysterious, its procedures unknown, its power immense and which is able to protect itself against the formal institutions of democracy by a wall of secrecy?

— Quoting the Anselmi Commission (which investigated P2): Daniele Ganser, “The ‘Propaganda Due’ Masonic Lodge and the CIA in Italy's First Republic,” in Wilson, Eric and Tim Lindsey (eds), Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (2009), p. 256