Talk to the handsITALY, a cabinet minister mused recently, was seen in the past as a country that did not make trouble. But that was in the past. Lately the left-right coalition of the prime minister, Matteo Renzi has provoked a succession of acrimonious disputes with the European Commission and Germany. This week, in the latest sign of Mr Renzi’s determination to be the bad boy of Brussels, he sacked Italy’s permanent EU representative, Stefano Sannino, a former Commission official who was seen as too accommodating. His replacement is the junior trade minister, Carlo Calenda, a member of Mr Renzi’s Democratic Party.
The conflict burst into the open on January 15th, when Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the commission, accused Mr Renzi of attacking his institution at every turn. Mr Renzi replied that the days when Italy let itself be “remote-controlled” from Brussels were over. Four days later Manfred Weber, the German who leads the centre-right group in the European Parliament, said Italy’s prime minister was jeopardising the EU’s credibility.
Mr Weber was referring to the sharpest of all the...Continue reading
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