The Italian crisis is over, and has just begun. Its dimensions go far beyond Italy; they are now European, even global. The near three-month long improvisations on a theme of governance ended last Thursday with the announcement of an administration headed by Giuseppe Conte, a law professor with no government experience tasked with running a Cabinet controlled by the leaders of the two parties which form that administration — a signal of weak, divided and warring politics at the summit of power for the foreseeable future.
It also reveals something deeper: the chronic inability of the Italian state to find a political floor solid enough to undertake the changes necessary to put the country — all of it, not just the wealthy north — on the road to modernization.
In Italy's case, that means a version of modernity which provides for its systems — political, economic, industrial, social provision, policing, security — to work with relative efficiency and transparency, untied to organized crime or networks of corruption. The politicians' failure to allow necessary reforms has meant, over the past quarter of a century, the demagogic and aimless premierships of Silvio Berlusconi, the floundering of center-left governments, reformist but continually undercut from within their own ranks, and technocratic governments with no popular base and thus limited leverage.
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