Atwitter about Matteo Renzi
For all the excitement about Italy’s prime minister, can he save the economy?
WHEN Matteo Renzi became Italy’s youngest prime minister in February, an old video turned up of him as a student in an amateur sketch playing the part of Silvio Berlusconi, the tycoon who has dominated Italian politics for 20 years. Deriding rivals as communists, promising to double salaries, offering to turn a cardinal into a pope, this Renzi-Berlusconi broke into song, promising “a government of brilliant people”.
The parody has a strange ring of contemporary truth. To many Italians, Mr Renzi looks like a Berlusconi of the left. Although he does not suffer from a questionable love life, conflicts of interest and battles with judges, Mr Renzi is a showman and headline-grabber rather like Mr Berlusconi. As mayor of Florence, he appeared on a magazine cover in a leather jacket posing as The Fonz in the television series “Happy Days”. If Mr Berlusconi was a master of television, Mr Renzi is a devotee of the internet and social media. Like Mr Berlusconi in the 1990s, he is an outsider who has triumphed amid the collapse of a discredited political order.
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So Mr Renzi faces one persistent question: can he save Italy, or will he turn out to be as ineffective as others before him? Italians still quote the words of a former prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti (also often attributed to Mussolini): “Governing Italy is not impossible; it is pointless.” After only four months in power, it is early to judge Mr Renzi. In rhetoric, at least, he embraces comprehensive reform and free markets. Italy must change in order to change Europe, he insists. His promise to bring in a big reform every month was overblown.
Now Mr Renzi says he needs 1,000 days to make a difference, not 100. On the flipside of his youth and energy are inexperience, improvisation and moments of vacuity. His personal style may hamper systematic government. This week Mr Renzi tweeted a picture of his desk, meant to show he was hard at work (hashtagged #lavoltabuona, or #thetimeisright), but some saw only a disorganised jumble of papers, pens, highlighters and half-drunk orange juice.
Mr Renzi’s clearest achievement has been tax relief worth €80 ($110) a month to poor workers, dished out in May, just in time for the European election. Bigger ones may yet be constitutional change to cut back the Senate and rebalance state powers, and a new electoral law. Dissenters are everywhere but Mr Renzi seems close to a deal, if only because all fear elections and the Renzi whirlwind.
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