Renzi, M. (2014) “Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Growth and Jobs in Italy – A Conversation With Matteo Renzi“, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 24 September.
PORAT: Good afternoon. My name is Ruth Porat, and I’m a member of the board of the Council and am delighted to welcome you here today to our meeting with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. I’d also like to welcome the CFR members around the nation and around the world participating in this meeting through the livestream.
Prime Minister Renzi, as I think we all know, swept into office this year with a clear mandate for change. As the youngest prime minister in Italy’s history, he’s inspired many with his commitment to drive significant structural change. As he once said, we want to restart Italy. We want Italy, which has an extraordinary, dizzying, astonishing past, to have a future, also. Or in darker terms, he said he wants to ensure that Italy — and I quote him here — exits the swamp by aggressively attacking structural elements that hinder growth and job creation, earning him the name “Il Rottamatore,” “the Scrapper,” as in scrapping the old.
His audacious agenda stands everything from shrinking an oversized, splintered parliament to streamlining decision-making to reforming everything from labor rules and the judiciary system to education. The prime minister represents youth, ambition and energy in Italian politics like no one has in decades, and not just because he is thirty-nine years old. And, sir, you barely missed the age cutoff for the Term Program for youth which would get you a discount on your membership.
(LAUGHTER)
His leadership team certainly reflects his commitment to changing the status quo, with very admirably half of them women and with an average age for the team of 48. He keeps in touch with his constituents via Twitter and has 1.5 million followers. But he is obviously inheriting a decades-long problem that is challenging to reverse, and that is the topic for today.
The Italian economy is stagnating and is likely to stay in recession for the third year in a row, with growth not expected until 2015, and less than 1 percent at that. Government debt is expected to hit around 136 percent of GDP in 2014, second only to Greece, and unemployment is at a painful 13 percent, and 43 percent among youth.
The naysayers are beginning to say that the prime minister’s government is not moving quickly enough, but he has been very clear about the set of changes that is needed and has demonstrated a willingness to challenge convention, while building the consensus needed for change, consistent with his view that the world should be viewed in terms of new and old, rather than left and right.
So we look forward to our conversation. We look forward to your opening comments. And then we’ll have some time for a conversation and open it up to everyone here. Thank you very much for joining us.
(APPLAUSE)
RENZI: I’m really honored to be here, and thank you so much for your kind expressions. Consensus for change, absolutely correct. This is a message I think I must copy, this statement for my next speech in Italy, because the risk is consensus for consensus, consensus for stay exactly in the same condition of the past. This is the most incredible risk for my country.
My country is an incredible country. We love Italy. I think you love Italy. Everybody love Italy. It’s impossible…
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
Yes, but — this is the asset, this is the risk for my country, because I don’t know if we love Italy for the past, for the present, or for the future. Surely, for the past, the past is amazing, gorgeous, art, culture, masterpieces, Roman empire and Renaissance. For me, I was mayor of Florence; Renaissance is a little better than empire of Rome but (inaudible) it’s not important.
But the past surely is a great, great, great asset for Italy. Also, a past focused on high technology, also for the sad pages of the past. For example, this is a mobile, you know? But the first telephone wasn’t American telephone. Now it’s the Apple. And we can discuss about how many Americans is Apple, not the piece, but the idea and the quality of product is clearly American.
The first telephone wasn’t American telephone. It wasn’t Bell telephone. Also, United States Congress in 2002, I think, recognize the first telephone was an Italian telephone, was created by Antonio Meucci. Antonio Meucci worked in the theater of Pergola in Florence, and he decided to invent this instrument. But he lost — he lost the opportunity to have the copyright for the lack of money. It’s a sad history, but maybe could be also a possibility for the future in Italy. We have good ideas, and we are not able to realize. Why?
Because we love our present. Despite the situation of economic results or the number of unemployed and older results, for example, of GDP. We love our present, because the present is a present of quality of life, of good experiences in every field, food, holiday, wine, obviously cars (inaudible) not only food, wine.
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