Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of the Interior takes a selfie with his supporter in Orbassano near Turin, Italy, on 15 June 2018. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.
Italy and Spain have new governments. Not many have noted this, apart from those who fancy reporting on the supposed ‘colour’ of Italian politics or Spain’s (usually successful) football. Italian politicians might be ‘neophytes in wild parade’, to paraphrase a sentence by the Resistance writer, Beppe Fenoglio, but there is also much more to it. The sum of Italy’s and Spain’s GDP is higher than India’s and slightly lower than Germany’s; the two countries have four banks in the world’s top 50, in contrast with Germany’s single case (Deutsche Bank). In other words, calling Italy and Spain ‘EU’s periphery’ is frankly ungenerous, even in purely quantitative terms.
What happens in these two countries matters and deserves much more attention. It is also time to re-assess the forces at play in Europe and claim a more equal union, especially in the Eurozone.
