Indeed I have two. One of them (which won't surprise you coming from me) is to accept that since even a 150 year fiscal union inside a monetary union hasn't led to real convergence, you should just undo unification.But the other goes back to a classic read on Southern Question &
Italy more broadly--the nature of Italian center-right representation and Italian capitalism, its fitful quest for efficiency, and the role of clientelist Southern elites as key mediators between state and society who held the balance of power in Rome.
So the question is whether there is now opportunity to remake Italian politics via something that looks like a PD/M5S coalition that focuses on political reform, judicial reform (which will have very substantial positive economic spillovers per every Article 4 I've read), and in
so doing, pairs a technocratic meliorist impulse with a mass base fed up by misgovernment in the worst governed part of Italy (and hopefully weans large chunks of the SME political universe from its Poujadism. There's a window for this given changes in Berlin and Paris.
That's in line with a read that fall of USSR, and the moderation of (the already Eurocommunist) PCI) led to a possible political opening in 1992 that was aborted politically by the rise of Silvio, and economically by the rise of China, CE4, Turkey in Italy's flexible SME space.
And since then, the country has been blocked politically and economically (the contrast with Spain is staggering). So I take this 3rd Republic talk seriously--there is an opportunity to change Italian political economy in coordination with core Europe not just rail against it.
