Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We are on vacation this week, but that doesn't mean we don't have an amazing show for you. Columbia Journalism School Professor Alexander Still talk to us about the recently deceased former Italian President Silvio Bertiscni and how we can thank him for America's politics today, including trump Ism.
But first we have former Congressmen Monde Jones. Welcome too, Fast Politics.
Your friend and mine. Mondere Jones, Mondair, do you have some you want to tell me? Perhaps an announcement.
I do have an announcement to my district in the seventeenth Congressional up in the Lower Hudson Valley to you into the world, and that is I'm going to be running for a term in Congress to continue the important work that I started last year.
Yes, what does that mean exactly running?
I'm running.
He's running, folks, I am running.
I'm so excited to be continuing the fight to serve the people who raised me in Rockland, Westchester, Huttnam and Dutchess Counties and to Lower costs for working families, to save democracy itself from this Republican fascist takeover of our country, to make sure that we get weapons of war off the streets, and yes, to protect basic freedoms like the
freedom to have an abortion. All of these things are at risk because of what we are seeing come out of Washington, particularly the House representatives, and what will likely happen with the Republican presidential nomination.
So you were in Congress before explain to us a little bit about New York had a radical redistricting, eleventh hour redistricting, and you kind of let the other guy run talk to us a little bit about that.
Last year was a nightmare. I never imagined waking up and seeing a redistricting process and political machinations come out of Washington that resulted in my congressional district up in the seventeenth being torn apart and being faced with the prospect of running against a member of my own party
and a colleague in Congress. In that moment, we were facing a nearly unprecedented assault on democracy by Republicans in Congress and nationally, we were looking at the freedom to have an abortion that was on its way to being taken away. We had seen the draft opinion in DBBS.
We had seen so much coming from the Republican Party that I did not want to make it less likely that my constituent would continue to be represented by someone who cared about democracy, by someone who would fight to protect the freedom to have an abortion, by someone who would continue to fight for working people like the family
I grew up in. And so rather than having bruising primary with the chair of the D trible seat, I decided to maximize the likely that my constituents, but can you can you continue to be well represented, And as a result ran in a different district, and that chair.
Of the D triple c actually lost.
He lost anyway, by eighteen hundred and twenty votes to a career political operative who will tell you anything you want to hear, but who will do anything that Kevin McCarthy and the extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress tell him to do. And that person's name is Mike Laalt.
I think it's important to pause for a minute. Democrats lost a lot of seats in New York State, perhaps because of the ghost of Andrew Cuomo and his non partisan redistricting which he set up in twenty twelve, kicked the can down the road a decade, and then we found ourselves in the middle of a non partisan redistricting nightmare, and his obsession was holding onto power in a theoretically
nonpartisan but really republican way. Democrats lost a bunch of seats to Republicans, ultimately causing them to lose the House. A lot of these candidates ran as not MAGA. They ran as sort of quote unquote normal Republicans. But it turns out it doesn't matter at all. They still vote with Kevin McCarthy.
They vote with Kevin McCarthy and with the extreme mag Republicans in Congress. They are indistinguishable from that cohort when you look at their voting record. So let's run the team, right. So the first legislative vote that Mike Waller took was to repeal provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Specifically, he voted to gut the irs so that billionaire corporations and very wealthy people could more easily cheat on their tax right.
Then had the nerve a few months later to complain about the deficit after having just voted for a policy that would have reduced the revenue that the US government receives and, by the way, in the process of taking us to the brink of default as a nation on our debt, voted for a bill that would cut services to veterans and reduce funding for law enforcement in the
midst of our nation's uniquely American gun violence epidemic. He voted a few weeks ago to overturn the ATF rule on gun braces, which would make us less safe from gun violence, in particular from mass shootings. He continues to oppose the freedom of women to have an abortion. He opposes a ban on AR fifteen's and other assault weapons weapons of war that have no business being in the hands of civilians, but wants to talk about crime. I'm happy to talk about crime, Miley. I relish the opportunity.
To talk about public safety in this I mean, the incredible thing about the crime situation is that we have a quote unquote democratic mayor. But that is really just in quotes who is obsessed with making the case that there's a terrible crime wife. But murders are down, and a lot of these crimes are actually flat. I mean, you may have complains, but that's what it is.
Well, Look, I want to be clear. New Yorkers deserve to feel and to actually be safe, and it's why I have consistently voted for historic levels of police funding every time I've gotten the chance in the United States Congress.
In fact, last.
Fall, I was the deciding vote on a rule that then resulted in six police funding bills getting a vote on the House floor, and I voted for every last one of them. It's also not lost on me that the Lower Hudson Valley is one of the safest places in America when you look at the US News and World Report rankings from a year or two ago. Rockland County third safist county in America, west Chester County fourbe safist county in America, Putnam County twelfth safist county in America.
And at some point we had to have a discussion about how the Republican description of the Hudson Valley as this crime ridden health gape is an affront to the important work that law enforcement officers every single day to keep us safe. They're doing an outstanding job and we have to continue to support them, and so I just want to make clear my position on that. Well.
I think it's really important that we talk about this, because this is not with Republicans, just like with the border, this is not about keeping people safe. If this is about finding an issue to get the base excited.
Right, I mean, God forbid, Republicans have to run on their record on the economy. I mean Joe Biden, for all of the criticisms that people may have about his age, perhaps in the minds of many voters, is someone who has presided over and has a record that he can take credit for of creating the most jobs, many millions of jobs in his first term, which is not even complete yet of any president in modern history, if not
in the history of this great nation. You know, we have lowered the cost of prescription drugs so that by the year twenty twenty five, people on Medicare like my grandmother will not have to pay more than two thousand dollars annually for prescription drugs. And we have seen incrementally the effects of that legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act,
in that in January of this year. For example, as of January of this year, no person on Medicare is paying more than thirty five dollars monthly for the cost of insulent This is a president that has, you know, along with Democrats in Congress like myself, who I actually negotiate a passage of the infrastructure law, brought the party
together in that moment. He passed the largest infrastructure bill in generations, which has brought and will be bringing billions of dollars to New York State alone to repair our crumbling roads and bridges, and to complete the Gateway project, for example, which is of great interest to my constituents in the Hudson Valley. He passed a Respect for Marriage Act, which made strides and ensuring marriage equality is the law
of the land. You know, this is a president who, along with Democrats like myself, helped keep small businesses open through our expansion of the paycheck protection program at the height of the COVID nineteenth pandemic, and so much more. You can tell I'm really passionate about this stuff.
Well, I mean, I think it's really important that you know, I continually think that Biden has really been underestimated and underappreciated for many of the things he's done, including his
really liberal policies. I mean, he was not my pick in twenty nineteen, but he has ultimately passed a lot of really liberal legislation, and I think, you know, we're seeing right now Republicans trying desperately because they see the writing on the wall and they know Trump is going to be the twenty twenty candidate, or at least they're pretty sure, which we all are, you know, are trying to get other people to run to the left of
Biden because they know that Biden. You know, Biden reads like a normal Democrat, standard Democrat, but he has actually done a lot of really progressive legislation.
You know, I don't even think of it as progressive legislation or liberal legislation. I think of it as legislation for working people. When you do the poling, this stuff's
extremely popular, including Republicans. Do you remember, I think it was sometime last year Congressman Byron Donald's Republican down in Florida, and I think maybe some other people were present at this private fundraiser and they got caught on the hot mic talking about how, you know, if you start giving the American people these policies, that they're going to start
voting Democratic because they're so popular. That's why you hear these sort of manufactured, factually incorrect stories about new York City trying to ban pizza ovens and nonsense like that, because I don't want to talk about the bread and butter issues.
That people care about.
People care about how did not put food on the table for their families. And I know this intimately because I grew up poor in Rockland County and my mom worked multiple jobs to provide for our family, and because the economy wasn't working to the point where she could just work one job and have that be enough. And of course she got help raising me from my grandparents. My grandfather was a janitor and my grandmother clean homes, and because childcare was so expensive.
From which it still is, if not worse now, Yeah, go on, yeah.
You know often times I had to go to work with her, and then, through the grace of God in an entire community in Rockley County that raised me, made it all the way to the halls of Congress, where I got to represent the same people whose homes I watched my grandmother crane growing up. But you know, no one should have to go through what I went through
as a child. This is an economy that can work for everybody, and I want to continue that fight, not not give tax breaks to billionaires and billion dollar corporations and try to play this sort of rhetorical jiu jitsu where you know, Mike Lawler, the incumbent Republican, is saying he wants to do something about the salt cap, that ten thousand dollars limitation on the state and local tax deduction, and not even acknowledge that it was Republicans in December
twenty seventeen. That's part of the first Trump tax scamp, right, that that put that cap into place which crush families here, and that's in Balley, right.
I want to talk about that salt tax for a minute because it's such a favorite topic of mine and Jesse so loves it when I talk about it. But you know that was ultimately the goal with the salt deduction was that in a state where you had higher local and state taxes, those taxes were usually used to buttress schools, and you know they were used to create a better quality of life for the people in blue states, right, So you had higher state taxes because that money went
to public schools and went to services for people. And in states like Texas where you didn't have state and local income tax, that was because they didn't give a fuck about children or public schools or anything like that. So the idea was to punish those blue states by raising their taxes.
Ad I'm proud to live in a state and in a community where government invests in infrastructure and in great public schools. You know, we've still got work to do with some of our school systems, but you know, here in Nuts and Valley, we've generally got great public school and that's because we invest in creating great public schools. I wish more communities had the resources to do that. But we should not be punished by Mitch Vaccano and other Republicans in Congress because of who we vote for
for president. And it is exactly what Republicans like Mike Lawa did back in December twenty seventeen, and so he doesn't get to run away from that record of his party.
Yeah, and I do think that it's really important when we talk about, you know, the way the government is supposed to work is that we are supposed to be represented no matter who we voted for, no matter the color of the state, a blue state, a red state. The president is a president for everyone. What was interesting about Donald Trump is that he had no interest in growing the electorate, which is why he didn't get reelected, and he just wanted to deliver for red states.
And this is sort of a vestige of that.
It is a vessage of that.
And this guy is now likely to be the Republican nominated for president next year. And I want people well to really sit with that, because I know that there is concern over the president running for reelection. But as he has said, I think quite effectively, do not compare me to the perfect, compare me to the alternative. And I think that's right. This is a district here in the Lower Hudsond Valley that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump
been by ten points. If we are not flipping seats that Joe Biden won by ten points, then we are simply not taking back the majority of the House of Representatives.
Of those eighteen House districts that Biden won, this is his fifth largest margin of victory, so it is literally the fifth vote required to take back the House of Representatives so that we can finally pass voting rights and other democracy reform legislation, so that we can pass legislation to codify Roby Wade, so that we can pass legislation to increase the federal menmum wage, which hasn't changed since two thousand and nine, and it is an abomination at
the current level. So that we can continue to lower the costs of prescription drugs, not just for people on men, but for people throughout our economy and throughout our society. Bees and so many other issues are what's at stake.
And it's not lost on me that Donald Trump is even more dangerous than he was the first time that people chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump, that you know, this guy is going to pardon the insurrectionists that nearly took my life in the lives of hundreds of other members of Congress on January sixth, But he has just been criminally indicted for the second time for doing what I think few people had imagined, which was stealing and then sharing national security secrets that cut our service members
and the nation at risk.
Yes, and also it was funny because we're only two indictments in.
I mean, there's still the fake the summer is not over.
There is still the fake electorate indictment, which is coming down the.
Pike it is, and then there's the January sixth investigation. After Donald Trump was indicted for the second time this year, time by the Department of Justice, Mike Lawler told the
press that the FBI and the DOJ were politicized. He made that statement without any evidence, And I got to tell you, I just never imagined waking up one day and seeing my member of Congress now in this district participate in the assault on the rule of law in this country, especially coming from a guy who belongs to a party that claims to care about the rule of law, and the assault on our institution, which is an assault on democracy itself.
By the way, Yes, absolutely true.
So just give us the two seconds here you have a primary, when is it?
Give us the sort of the TLDR.
I've got a little bit of a primary that will be decided by June of next year in New York State. One of my opponents is the younger sister of the governor of the state of Michigan. I have great respect for anyone who would run against me in the primary, and so look forward to a robust exchange of ideas, and frankly, I look forward to campaigning on my record of accomplishment of delivering actual results for people in the
Lower Hudson Valley these past two years. I am optimistic based on the energy on the ground, people urging me to run, urging me to restore the leadership that this district deserves, and candidly moldy a lot of people who were just really hurt by the unfair way in which people in our district were treated last year, both by National Democrats and yes by the acting Supreme Court judge up in Stuben County who redrew the congressional district and cause a lot of damage frankly to the interests of
the people here. And so I'm looking forward to making right to addressing that injustice and continuing to deliver for my constituents, who again I just love so much and who took me from poverty, me to the halls of Congress. The bond that I have is one that I cherished
with these people. So please, if you care about saving our democracy and protecting basic freedoms and continuing to lower costs for working people and getting weapons of war off our streets, go to Monderefourcongress dot com and smash it.
Dony Bud Thank you so much, Monde. I hope you'll come back. Of course, I'll come back.
I mean, there's gonna be a lot happening in these next sixteen months, and it's important to continue this discussion.
Alexandra Still is a professor at the Columbia Journalism School.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Alexandra, Hi, thanks for having me.
Very excited to have you.
One of the many smart things you've written recently is a really interesting idea that, in fact, for Thosconi walked so that Trump could run.
Well, yeah, I mean I think that what I was down intriguing about Billisconi. When he first kind of came on the scene, A lot of people kind of just missed him as a kind of comical figure. You know, he'd been a cruoner on a cruise ship when he was a student. He was kind of loud and vulgar. He seemed like a product of a certain kind of corrupt Italian culture. And what I think I noticed early on was that he was also an extremely innovative and whether you like it or not, had pioneered a new
kind of politics. That he was sort of like the first postmodern politician. He understood that we had moved out of an era of arty politics, ideology, class based politics in which people voted their economic class, and that Berlo Sconi had innovated a kind of inter class appeal. He was a billionaire populist.
Tell our listeners a little bit about Italy when Berlasconi came.
To power, what it looked like and how he did it.
Sure, I wonder if I could just take one step back before even more.
That's great?
Yeah, which is you know? Bert was going? He made his first fortune in real estate and then quickly moved into television. There was no such thing as private TV before the mid nineteen seventies. Early it was the monopoly of the Italian state TV known as RYE, and the Italian High Court had ruled that there could be private TV, but on a limited basis, purely on a only local broadcasts.
Berl's going. He saw an opportunity, jumped into it, brought up a lot of local stations, and then, in typical Ball was Going to Eat Fashion, skirted the rules by broadcasting the same program like three seconds apart, claiming that they were local, but then selling advertising nationally. So he quickly gained an advantage over his competitors and became the
biggest figure in private TV. Brought up his two biggest competitors, and by the early nineteen eighties had literally a monopoly of private TV, ninety percent of the market of private television and a kind of what was known as a duopoly with the three state TV channels and his three private channels having like a ninety percent of audience share in the country. So that was the first really big
thing that he did. And in order to establish private TV, he changed the culture of Italy and that what I think is so interesting about Berlosconi is that he changed the culture of the country and that culture then elected him as a politician. And what I mean by that is that the world before Berlosconi in Italy was a kind of austere and moralistic. It was dominated by the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, both of you which
were kind of moralistic in their own different ways. You couldn't, literally for a long time, even advertise dog food on the state TV because it was considered to be a moral and Berlosconi instead realized, I'm going to make this private TV thing where anything goes. All I care about is audience and advertising. I'm going to get the cheesiest,
most popular programs. I don't work educating the public, and I need to create a world of desire in which a new Italians learned to long for things they didn't even know they wanted before and them you know, so I have you know, programs like Dallas and Dynasty which create an atmosphere of luxury and wealth and material well being. And then my my viewers are going to want those things. So my advertisers are earned going to pay me a
lot of money in order to advertise their products. So we created this kind of materialistic culture, which followed a long period during the Cold War of ideological struggle between left and right. There was you know, terrible terrorism in Italy during the nineteen seventies, and it's Goni promised a post ideological world, a world in which let's not worry about you know, all this politics stuff. Let's have a good time, Let's have on looking at scantily cloud women
and you know, watching cheesy programs and watching Baywatch. And so he offered a different kind of society in which you didn't have to be ashamed of being rich or wanting to be rich, and that's a very important predicate to his political large. So then what happens is that in the early nineties, the political system that had sustained
Berlosconi and protected his monopoly began to crumble. There was this big corruption investigation on his operation Clean Hands, which start two and suddenly left him without his political protectors. And by nineteen ninety three these people were going to prison, fleeing the country community side, and he realized, holy shit, if I don't do something fast, I'm going to go the way of these people, and so, you know what, I'm going to actually take over the political system. He
did something that nobody thought was possible. One thing you have to credit Berlosconi with is with extraordinary audacity and guts, and so he basically turned what was then already the largest or the second largest private company in the country into a political war machine. All parts of the company, from the ad salesman to the people who sold mutual for auds, to the executives and the TV company all are working towards the aim of electing Berlisconi and his newly formed party.
Really sounds like Trump and then it works.
I mean it was. It was like Trump on steroids in a sense. It was, you know, as if you had somehow married Trump and the Murdoch Empire. And created hybrid figure you'd have Berlosconi. So one of the other things he did, which is very much should seem very familiar to American listeners, is that his media, before the creation of Fox News, created a hyperpowers and type of media.
His three TV networks, his magazine group, his ropers all began flooding the zone with pro berliscone stuff and attacking anyone that dared to attack or criticize him.
It's like Ruper Murdoch a little bit.
Yeah, very much, very much, and it was very clear. I mean, they are one of the people who participated in these meetings and published a book in which he recorded some of the conversations, and Bertolosconi said, we have to sing in chorus so that the people who attack us are then hit with concentrated fire and they will stop.
That's sort of what happened. Anytime you raise your head and criticize Berolosconi, you could count on, you know, scurless stories appearing about you, fake scandals, everything to kind of distract people from what was happening with Bertolosconi. So that ended up being a very successful model. He gets into power in nineteen ninety four and then things get very bumpy because a thing that is, in a sense, it's
not unlike Trump. Trump came in promising that he was going to be the defender of the working class, and he was going to stand up for the forgotten people who didn't get represented from the coastal elites, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, the one economic program he actually passes is a big tax cut that goes largely to the very rich. Brosconi did the same thing,
and he promised to be an economic miracle worker. He was going to be the Italian Margaret Thatcher who was going to cut bureaucracy at ape and liberate the economic engine of the country. And he didn't do any of that because he wasn't really interested in the boring, difficult work of government, and what he really cared about was protecting his media empire from regulation and staying out of prison and keeping associates up right.
Like Trump very much.
It's kind of a remarkable It does sort of make you realize that there's something in this particular moment of history. It produces these kinds of figures and then makes this a kind of winning formula. What he has or had that is also very much like Trump, is this ability to appeal to people who are in a very different economic class from him. So or working people who in Italy used to vote for the Italian Communist Party are suddenly voting for Bill Sconi. Why because he seems authentic?
Theyn't They know that his policies may not really align with their interests, but you know, they find his personality appealing, the fact that he is tells off color jokes, and like Trump, yeah, very much. It's this idea in which you replace programs with authenticity. So you're not buying a political program, you are buying a personality, and authenticity has become the value that you prize the most, rather than let's say, ideological consistency or a program that makes sense to you.
This it's incredible. I mean why I read that piece.
And you know, I grew up spending a lot of time in Italy because my mother had an Italian boyfriend who I think boyfriend is a generous term for what this relationship was, and so we spent a lot of time there and I grew up during the eighties and nineties, so Berlusconi was the guy, and my mother always hated him because she thought he was a fascist. But they had a very similar you know, they were both very
into sex. They were both very into dirtiness and naughtiness and whatever, and and you know, he got involved with a lot of scroll as people, et cetera, et cetera, and he did really he went into office, and like Trump, he had lots of trials.
Yeah.
Well, the thing you mentioned about sex, I think is important because one of the things that he did, as I mentioned, is that he changed the culture like you would not have had you know, Nate Good or scantily cloud women on Satle before Berolosconi. And so he's completely
unapologetic about doing that. He introduces the first nude game show into Italy or the world as far as I during all of his entertainment programs, even on serious subjects, you'd have a woman standing there in a kind of low cut dress showing her thighs, known as the velina, and so that people could gawk at her while they're listening to something about soccer or politics. So he introduces, you know, sex and transgression becomes part of his trademark,
which is again very much like Trump. You know, he would brag about his own sexual accomplishments, made no secret of it, created you know, various scandals. You know, like he's visiting an earthquake zone with an attractive female public official who's like, you know, worrying about you know, people who have ended up homeless, and he ends up saying, you know, can I caress this woman?
Right?
Also about Claude and Kiosi, he said, so that kind of thing where he's these things that sort of right thinking people were appalled by. To a lot of ordinary Italians, it's like, okay, yeah, he's not really a traditional politician. He's somebody liked me. I might say something like that. Certainly I would have fought it. And he has the guts to say what other people think but don't say.
So that's very much part of a Trump thing. Then the scandals begin to accumulate almost as soon as he gets into office, because he goes into politics in part to head off these corruption investigations that are rising up the ladder, and he knows that there are lots of skeletons in his own corporate closet, and like many businesses, he and his associates have had to pay bribes for years, and eventually these things will be found out, and.
In fact they are.
It turns out that Berlusconi's chief lawyer has had various judges on his payroll. Hundreds of thousands of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars are traveling from berlisconi corporate accounts into the Swiss bank accounts of a sitting judge. Twenty one billion Lira, which is about fifteen million dollars, was discovered going into the account of the socialist leader Batio
Craxy things like that. So all that stuff is accumulating even as he's trying to govern, which makes of course governing impossible because he's spending all of his time putting out these fires and going from crisis to crisis. So he ends up his first government collapses partly because of these crises. But the thing about Bosconi is that you can sort of map his career in the following way. When he's in power, things go badly and he governs poorly.
As soon as he's out of power, it's like Superman regaining his hours, and then he becomes an incredibly potent opposition figure fighting to get back into power. Then he gets back into power, he's bored. He starts to make mistakes governs poorly, they kick him out, and then he
goes back into opposition mode. So there are these kind of alternating periods, you know, when he's in power in ninety four and then out of power until two thousand and one, back in power and then again out and then back in power in I think two thousand and eight to twenty eleven.
And then he also goes to jail.
No, well he doesn't. He never went to jail. He had many, many trials, right, Okay. One of the things that's unfortunately it's a little tricky to explain, but I'll keep it simple. Italy has three levels of judge of judgment, so you can't be officially convicted until you've exhausted two sets of appeals. So you can be convicted a trial, but technically you're still not convicted until an appeals court has ruled on it and then the highest court has signed off on that.
So it's hard to go to jail in Italy, is what you're saying.
It's hard to go to jail. But it's even worse than that because all countries have something called the statute of limitations, where you can't be prosecuted years and years after the fact. But in almost all countries the statute of limitation clock ends the moment judicial action begins, so you can't draw a case out and have it thrown
out just because you've gone past the time limit. In Italy, that's not the case, and so Bert's going with his armies of lawyers and these three levels of appeal would drag these cases out until the statute of limitations had run and then he could say, hey, wait a second, I was never convicted.
So he can just run out the clock on everything ran out the clock.
And of course most Italians didn't grasp the distinction between running out the clock with statute of limitation because he was actually convicted numerous times at a trial level where he's been on the second level of appeal, but the case was then thrown out on statute of limitation grounds. So there are many cases of that kind, including bribing a sitting senator to get him to change his vote and bring down a government to give you an idea.
He then is finally convicted and I think it's twenty thirteen of a tax fraud case, and that case makes it through all levels of judgment. He doesn't go to jail, but he is prevented from holding office for I think five years. That kind of puts in out of the game for a good period of time.
Italy right now, what is happening over there.
Well, I think what's happening and in a sense, the hangover of the Berlosconi era is that Berlosconi's lack of interest in governing and incompetence meant that Italy was the slowest growing country in Europe for about thirty years, and so the country has been doing really quite poorly since the early nineteen nineties. Over a million young people have left the country because they don't see a future for themselves in Italy. They are living in the US and
Canada and France, England and Germany, you name it. Those who stay live with their parents until they're in their thirties or forties. So there's a really bad situation, which is meant that there's a lot of unhappiness and discontent with the political system. That's meant that they've elected a right wing government headed by Georgia Maloney together with Berlisk, what remains of Belisconi's party and another conservative party. So you can look at it as oh my god, the
post fascists are back. But I think it's perhaps more useful to look at the fact that Italy is kind of flailing around looking for a solution to these long, very deep seated problems of huge public debt, slow economy, almost non existent birth rate, you know, one point two for children per woman, unhappiness of immigration, but a persistent need for immigrant labor in order to make the run.
So they've got a whole lot of problems that they're grappling with, and I don't know that they have the answers, but it means at the moment that that favors a right wing government and we'll see if they can do something about these problems. But I think that the problems are much deeper than that, and Belisconi's biggest disservice to the country was failing to address all the issues that he got into politics saying he wanted to address.
Maloney's government has been in for a year, Yeah, a little less than a year. Is your sense that there's anything good happening there?
I think it's a mixed bag. I mean, the economy is growing a little bit, but whether that has to do with her government or not, or just picking up. These things are really hard to parse. She's taking a hard line on immigration, but immigration continues as much as ever. She wants to make it easier for Italians to raise families, but I don't see them reversing the demographic situation anytime soon, So I think it's a little bit too early to tell. But the problems are deep and are not going to
be sort of solved by rhetorical positions. You can say I won't stop immigration, but I think last year, like six hundred thousand Italians died and less than four hundred thousand were born. So you have a deficit of two hundred thousand people every year of people who are dropping
out of the workforce, added to the pension roles. So Italy has to come to terms with the fact that like it or not, it's going to become a multicultural society and it's not culturally ready to do that, and so that costs all kinds of problems.
Thank you so much, Alexander. I found this completely fascinating. I'm so just so interesting.
I really appreciate you, right, my pleasure.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.