The symmetry behind extended flavour democracy and large leptonic mixing

We show that there is a minimal discrete symmetry which leads to the extended flavour democracy scenario constraining the Dirac neutrino, the charged lepton and the Majorana neutrino mass term (MR) to be all proportional to the democratic matrix, with all elements equal. In particular, this discreet symmetry forbids other large contributions to MR, such as a term proportional to the unit matrix, which would normally be allowed by a S3L×S3R permutation symmetry. This feature is crucial in order to obtain large leptonic mixing, without violating ʹt Hooftʹs naturalness principle.