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In Italy, a winter of discontent
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| Contributor | Imperator |
| Last Edited | Imperator Dec 13, 2007 06:28am |
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| Category | Analysis |
| News Date | Thursday, December 13, 2007 12:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | ROME: All the world loves Italy because it is old but still glamorous. Because it eats and drinks well but is rarely fat or drunk. Because it is the place in hyper-regulated Europe where people still debate with perfect intelligence what, really, the red in a stoplight might mean.
But these days, for all the outside adoration and all its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is "malessere," or malaise, and it implies a collective funk - economic, political and social - summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, report themselves the least happy people in Western Europe.
"It's a country that has lost a little of its will for the future," said Walter Veltroni, Rome's mayor and a possible future prime minister. "There is more fear than hope."
The problems are, for the most part, not new - and that is the problem: They have simply caught up to Italy over many years to the point that no one seems clear how change can come - or if it is possible anymore at all.
Italy has long charted its own way of belonging to Europe, struggling like few other countries with fractured politics, uneven growth, organized crime and a tenuous sense of nationhood. |
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