Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Zuzana, Monshank and Jack Smith.

Today, we would like to follow up on a story we wrote earlier this week on the longevity of governments in times of falling productivity growth.

One observation we've made is that productivity growth tanks, incumbent governments get often replaced by

others, budgets that are often designed to bribe electorates no longer fulfill that function,

and that electorates that are impatient hunt for alternative governments, which may explain

why the long political cycles we saw in Europe in the 50s, 60s, all the way until the

1970s, 80s are now becoming shorter. We've had very long cycles in Germany and in the UK in

particular, very long stints of conservative and labor, respectively. In Germany, it was the CDU,

the 16 years of coal and the 16 years of Merkel. Our observation is that this may be over in that Italy may be sort of a conary in the coal mine of ever-changing governments every five years.

And it happened to Renzi, it happened to Prody, it happened to Belisconi.

He was the longest.

Yeah, I was about to say I think the average is a little bit shorter than five years.

Exactly. So we have, the question obviously in Italy is that that could happen to Maloney.

Clearly, the trigger for this article was this week's budget in the UK, which people discussed, as always they do here, as a sort of political budget.

Did Jeremy Hunt do enough to secure the election? The consensus was that he

didn't. And the point we made is that he couldn't. No matter what he did, there's no way he could

have delivered a budget that would have secured his party, an election victory, or even doesn't

even look like it delivered a small recovery. And it's extremely poor fortunes at the moment.

We're looking at this as a sort of a wider trend.

It's not just the UK story.

It's something that happens elsewhere in Europe.

And the question to project, you write about Italy.

...