Matteo Renzi became Italy’s youngest prime minister on Saturday, promising a new era of stable government after using old-school politicking to engineer the ouster of a fellow Democrat he deemed too timid to get the nation back to work.
The unabashedly ambitious Renzi, 39, quit his post as Florence mayor to take up his first national government job, insisting that Italy’s political leadership needed to be bolder.
He tweeted before being sworn in that it will be “tough,” but “we’ll do it.”
Photo: EPA
The Italian economy is only just beginning to show signs of rebounding after several years of stagnation. Youth unemployment hovers at about 40 percent.
New Italian Minister of the Environment Gian Luca Galletti told Sky TG24 TV the down-to-business, bluntly talking prime minister conducted his first Cabinet meeting “more like a board meeting.”
Renzi has alienated some factions in his own party, because of the steely determination he used to dispatch former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta only days after publicly saying he would only seek the job through general elections.
The usually easygoing Letta gave Renzi a chilly, limp handshake during a brief handover ceremony on Saturday. Renzi forced a wan smile. Neither Democrat looked each other in the eyes.
That chilliness contrasts with the cordial relationship Renzi has been cultivating with the Democrats’ archrival, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s main conservative leader.
Shortly before he pushed Letta aside, Renzi cut a deal with Berlusconi to work together on electoral reform to reduce the influence of tiny parties on the government. Both men see an overhaul of election rules as potentially positioning their rival forces for a more convincing victory at the ballot box.
While a tax fraud conviction keeps Berlusconi out of public office, the media mogul made clear on Saturday that he disagrees with Renzi’s plans for elections as far off as 2018.
“You have democracy and a government of the people when the government is elected by the citizens,” Berlusconi said.
When Berlusconi agreed to the reform deal, Renzi had been pushing for elections immediately after the new rules were in place.
Letta had had a slim majority in the Senate, but Renzi might need defectors from the opposition if some of his own Democrats rebel against his heavyhanded leadership.
Pippo Civati, one of the Democrats soundly defeated by Renzi in the party primary in December last year, questioned whether the new prime minister deserved support in parliament. On his Web site, Civati asked rank-and-file Democrats to have their say, “because it’s usually the voters who choose” the prime minister.
Renzi’s government also depends on smaller parties ranging from center-right to center-left that were part of Letta’s oft-bickering 10-month-old coalition.
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not