Matteo’s battles
They may even be illusions of grandeur – as the foreign press claim – yet Renzi’s Italy is growing, ever so slightly!
They may even be illusions of grandeur – as the foreign press claim – yet Renzi’s Italy is growing, ever so slightly! “To us, Europe means values and ideals, not polemics by professionals of the decimal point”. For months now, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has been adopting a harsher tone towards the European Union. Renzi views himself as an advocate of European “values and ideals”, locked in a confrontation with the European Commission (led by Jean-Claude Juncker and loyal to Angela Merkel’s Germany), whose members have nothing better to do than to play the sad role of “professionals of the decimal point“.
While Renzi continues to portray himself as Europeanist to the bone, the questions he focuses on today are quite different from those of two years ago, during his first months in office. This shift has not escaped the attention of the German press, which in February 2014 had saluted the Florentine as an asset for both Italy and Europe and was amazed by the results of the May 2014 European elections in which Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD) obtained a spectacular 40.8%.
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