Italy has produced five prime ministers in six years. The latest came in on Saturday, when the 39-year-old mayor of Florence and new leader of the centre left Partito Democratico (PD), Matteo Renzi, was sworn in. Like each of his predecessors, he promised to save Italy from itself. The political, legislative and economic systems would be overhauled. The incessant rot that was threatening to turn the euro zone's third largest economy into a sunny Mediterranean backwater, dotted with the palaces of Renaissance popes and modern-day Mafiosi, would be halted.
Don't believe it. Yes, Renzi is a fresh face and deserves encouragement for his fresh start. The problem isn't him or his team of apparently dynamic cabinet ministers, half of them women, some in their 30s; it's Italy itself. The country has been in relentless political, cultural and economic decline since the 1970s and nothing short of an all-out revolution has the potential to deliver salvation.
But post-War Italy doesn't do revolutions and won't under Renzi. The system that protects the country's vested interests, from the professional guilds shielded from competition to the bloated bureaucracies that protect themselves by protecting the guilds, is still largely intact. Will he blow them up? Not likely.
Six years ago, shortly after I moved to Rome, I interviewed Sergio Marchionne, then merely the CEO of Fiat, now the CEO of both Fiat and Chrysler. At the time, Lehman Bros. was still intact and talk of the explosive financial crisis and the relentless European recession that would soon come were unimaginable.
Yet Fiat's turnaround was going slowly, in spite of the success of new cars like the Fiat 500 and Grande Punto, and Marchionne was close to despair about the cost of doing business in Italy and the invisible pace of economic reform. He mused aloud about fixing Italy, to the point I was half convinced he wanted to take on Europe's ultimate political change – making clapped out Italy competitive again. I remember him saying "I would do it, but it would mean living in a bunker because they'd want to kill me."
Well, indeed. Renzi's predecessors didn't want to live in bunkers and each failed in their own peculiar ways. In 2008, the sober, sensible and refreshingly dull Romano Prodi – a technocrat who understood that Chinese manufacturers were about to eat Italy's lunch – succumbed to a corruption scandal involving his justice minister. His post-Lehman successor, Silvio Berlusconi, refused to acknowledge that Italy was in deep crisis and partied his way out of contention in the autumn of 2011, when he was replaced by another sophisticated, worldly dullard, Mario Monti. Monti made some progress on the reform front, then made the fatal mistake of deciding to become an elected politician (he has been appointed by the president). That meant he had to make nice with parties and institutions he once criticized. The reforms all but stopped, if not the austerity measures, and Monti lost the election.
Monti's successor, the PD's Enrico Letta, endured a year of party and coalition infighting, then got stabbed in the back by Renzi. During his one year in office, Letta was unable to push through any significant reforms. Unemployment kept rising; by the time he was ousted, Italy's youth jobless rate was almost 42 per cent and the Greek economy was recovering faster than Italy's.
Now it's Renzi's turn. To be sure, he's off to a decent start, even if his opening speech in parliament was plodding and lacked details. He has won convincing votes of confidence in both houses of parliament. His cabinet, with just 16 members, is lean and young. He is telegenic and, bland maiden speech aside, is a good communicator.
Whether he will have what it takes to tackle Italy's vested interests is an open question. Italy is such a closed economic shop that it would take a nuclear bomb to blow it apart. The professional guilds – pharmacists, taxi drivers, architects, police, university professors, airline pilots, among many others – thrive in a system that shuts out competition, depriving their industries of innovation and fresh young talent and ensuring undeserved salary increases. Bureaucracies and government ministries protect them in exchange for their political support, hence the crippling permit system required to launch a competing business.
I suspect Renzi will essentially do what the Americans did in Vietnam: Retreat and declare victory.
Italy will see its revolution. It will happen when the shrinking middle class finally eats through its stored wealth, gets angry and takes to the streets, as the Ukrainians are doing. But that point has not come yet and may not come for years. Renzi may prove to be another tinkerer.
Eric Reguly