Italian Premier Matteo Renzi on his way to meeting French President Francois Hollande, March, 2016. Luca Bruno / Press Association. All rights reserved.Rome, London, Washington, Wien: these are different and distant places. Yet it is rather obvious nowadays to connect the dots and read them as just nation-specific symptoms of a worldwide phenomenon. We are witnessing what is increasingly looking like the meltdown of an entire political and economic system which has governed the developed world for at least three decades.
In Italy, the results of yesterday’s election of local city councils surpassed even the expectations of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. In Rome, the city which has lived for decades almost exclusively off salaries paid by a heavily indebted and inefficient central administration, only one out of ten electors voted for the Democratic Party of the PM, Matteo Renzi.
Milan looked a certain bet only a few months ago at the close of a successful Universal Exposition and yet the candidate of the PD, the manager of the EXPO, Giuseppe Sala, is forced to fight a neck and neck battle at the ballot box in two weeks’ time to avoid defeat. Renzi has been wise enough to admit that the situation is serious. Nevertheless there is a sense that he might be about to pay considerably for having underestimated the mission he promised to accomplish. In the event that both the political and economic capital of the country are lost, even the outcome of the referendum on changes to Italy’s constitution to be held in October is open to question. If the constitutional changes proposed by the Government are not approved, Renzi has already said he will resign, quitting political life, at which point his promise of change coupled with stability will vanish.
