The simple reason is that Italy was still a nominal constitutional monarchy with King Victor Emmanuel III as its head. As a dictatorship, Italian Fascism co-opted, undermined, and flat out ignored constitutional institutions and provisions. But Mussolini never quite had the political will or power to simply scrap the pre-1922 political order in lieu of a new form of government. Novel Fascist institutions like the Grand Council of Fascism coexisted with established institutions like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The monarchy generally formed a political alliance with Fascism that ultimately broke in the wake of a series of Italian defeats in the war.