![]() He won, and within a matter of weeks of becoming PD leader, he took down Prime Minister Enrico Letta, and assumed his seat in the Palazzo Chigi - becoming the youngest Italian prime minister ever, a youthful figure in gerontocratic Rome.Īny questions about Renzi petering out are dismissed by his aides with smiles and guffaws. A former boy scout and member of the centrist Christian Democracy party - hardly the sort of background that appeals to Italy’s traditional communist left - Renzi still managed to energize his dispirited party base when he ran for leadership of the Partito Democratico (PD) in 2013, taking on unions, intellectuals, progressive pundits, and, most of all, Italian politics-as-usual. There was one part of the website that remained up to date, Crepaldi wrote, tongue-in-cheek: The clock on the bottom of the homepage ticked on, mercilessly counting down the minutes until Renzi’s first 1,000 days were up.Ĭould a dusty website be a symptom of fatigue? A sign that energy and youth are not a credible alternative to a sound strategy to create jobs? That Renzi’s penchant for trendy shirts (his casual, white button-downs and disdain for jackets are a constant topic of discussion among Italy’s fashion press) cannot alone drag the country out of a stagnation that has now lasted more than 25 years, depriving an entire generation of la dolce vita? 21, making no mention of several major corruption scandals that had since hit Rome, including some involving members of Renzi’s own party. ![]() The website’s section on justice hadn’t been touched since Aug. The latest update in the politics section, on a speech Renzi gave in London, was 50 days old at the time. ![]() But by late November, freelance reporter Alberto Crepaldi noticed something disconcerting: After just a few short months, Passo Dopo Passo had fallen into disrepair. The site was intended to track Renzi’s progress on his many reform pledges during his first 1,000 days in office. ROME - Last September, five months after he became prime minister, Matteo Renzi, with great fanfare, launched a website called Passo Dopo Passo (“Step by Step”).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |