52 Europe The Economist February 13th 2021
Italian politicsNo time for
foot-Draghing
Behind that woeful performance lies an ar-
ray of obstacles to growth, held firmly in
place by vested interests.
In consultations with the various par-
ties, Mr Draghi has hinted at how he in-
tends to deal with both the challenge and
the opportunity. The priority areas he indi-
cated were health (a central aim must be to
speed up vaccination); education (he has
suggested that the school year be extended
to allow students to catch up); the protec-
tion of individuals and enterprises from
the effects of the pandemic; and, less obvi-
ously, the environment (which squares
with the priorities of the commission and
the m 5 s). The prime minister-designate’s
targets for reform are said to include Italy’s
tax regime, its stultifying bureaucracy and
a slow, unpredictable civil-justice system
that discourages both domestic enterprise
and foreign investment.
But these are tasks for a period of years,
so the first question that arises is how Mr
Draghi’s long-term aims can be reconciled
with the eu’s exacting deadlines and—a
point largely overlooked in the euphoria
surrounding his appointment—the short
life expectancy of his government. Con-
tracts for 70% of the recovery funds must
be awarded and signed by the end of 2022
and the remainder committed within the
following year. In the meantime, a general
election must be held by early 2023. But,
given the parties’ aversion to winter cam-
paigning, it is more likely in the first half of
next year. Mr Draghi may want to step
down even sooner if he is to run for presi-
dent in a separate election due in February- “I think he’ll set a working method
for the next government,” says Veronica De
Romanis, who teaches European econom-
ics at luiss, a university in Rome.
A second question is how much unpop-
ularity Mr Draghi is prepared to risk. When
the outgoing government suggested a
longer school year, it prompted an outcry
from the unions. Tax reform usually fa-
vours some parts of society at the expense
of others. And Mr Draghi’s approach to
safeguarding enterprises may also prove
controversial. Last year he co-chaired a
working group of the Group of Thirty, an
informal body of bankers and officials,
that looked at restoring the corporate sec-
tor after the pandemic. It concluded that
governments should focus on supporting
viable firms and managing the pace of
what his co-chair called “the needed cre-
ative destruction”.
Mr Draghi is popular. But Italy’s electo-
rate and parliament are notoriously fickle.
“If he starts immediately with these re-
forms we have been speaking about for 20
years, he will have a chance of success,”
says Giuliano Noci, professor of strategy
and marketing at Milan’s Politecnico Uni-
versity. “But if he waits for more than a
month, the sentiment will change.”
ROME
The prime minister-designate will have
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as thereever a luckier prime minis-
ter than Mario Draghi? Or an unluck-
ier one? He looks set to come into office
with around €200bn from the eu’s recov-
ery funds to spend. But he will also take
over Europe’s worst-performing economy
in a pandemic and with a parliamentary
majority hard put to agree on anything, let
alone on controversial structural reforms
the European Commission wants to see
implemented as the largesse is disbursed.
By February 12th only the far-right
Brothers of Italy party had declined the
chance to climb aboard the “Super Mario”
bandwagon, though the backing of the ide-
ologically variegated Five Star Movement
(m 5 s), the biggest group in parliament, was
still in doubt. Faced with a grass-roots re-
bellion, its leadership was putting support
for Mr Draghi’s government to an online
vote. Even the hard-right Northern League
hastily renounced its Euroscepticism to
book a place in Italy’s next parliamentary
majority, and perhaps its cabinet.
The former president of the European
Central Bank faces both a daunting chal-
lenge and a unique opportunity. The chal-
lenge is to cope with the effects of covid-19
in a country hard hit by the virus; Italy is
fourth in the euin terms of deaths relative
to population. Its economy shrank by 8.8%
last year, compared with 5% in Germany. If
a ban on sackings is lifted at the end of
March, an estimated 250,000 more people
will be dumped onto the labour market. Mr
Draghi’s opportunity, though, is to use the
recovery funds to start reversing two dec-
ades of economic decline. Even before the
pandemic, Italians’ real gdpper person
was lower than at the start of the century.foreign—and crushes them. This tactic
worked in 2013, when a small protest in de-
fence of a small park snowballed into
countrywide demonstrations after Mr Er-
dogan referred to the protesters as looters
and had them sprayed with tear-gas and
rubber bullets. Dozens were later rounded
up and indicted on coup charges.
Mr Erdogan is doing something similar
today, while attempting to seize control of
Bogazici, a rare bastion of liberalism in a
country increasingly under the sway of na-
tionalists and Islamists. Sexual minorities
make a perfect target. Homophobia in Tur-
key is a chronic condition. With the excep-
tion of the country’s main Kurdish party,
no political group in Turkey has embraced
lgbtrights, out of both conviction and fear
of a conservative backlash.
After an abortive coup in 2016, Mr Erdo-
gan redoubled his attempts to bring educa-
tion into line with his vision of a more pi-
ous, prouder Turkey, a country looking in-
ward rather than westward. Under an
emergency law, he sacked over a thousand
academics accused of terrorist sympathies
(with scant evidence) and gave himself the
power to appoint university rectors. His
choice of Melih Bulu, a longtime member
of the ruling party, as Bogazici’s president,
has gone down particularly badly. Since be-
ing parachuted in, Mr Bulu has had to con-
tend with claims that he plagiarised parts
of his dissertation. Condoning the arrests
of hundreds of his students has not made
him popular on campus.
Once again, Turkey’s president has de-
liberately turned a local crisis into a na-
tional one. Once again, he seems poised to
prevail through a combination of division,
intimidation and force. But all this comes
at a price. In a poll published last year, over
62% of young people in Turkey said they
would prefer to live abroad if they had the
means. If the country’s best and brightest
start leaving, Mr Erdogan will have no one
to blame but himself. The latest enemy