Matteo Renzi. Flickr/Valerio Ianci. All rights reserved.For the past few months the European political scene has been dominated by Ukraine, Greece and the issue of terrorism. As an inevitable result, attention has moved away from Italy and its apparently fruitless search for political stability.
The current trends in the Italian political scene need to be viewed in light of the fact that the Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, although never elected to the Italian Parliament, has led his party to an astounding 41% of the vote in last May’s European elections, and that, according to recent opinion polls, his rate of approval, though dropping, is still over 35%.
No political party or leader in the history of the Republic has ever enjoyed such a position of voter confidence since the early fifties and even that master vote-getter, Silvio Berlusconi, who held sway over Italian politics for the past two decades, never got much past the 30% mark.
