Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me I'm Susanne Munchank and

Jack Smith. Today we'll talk about Italy's constitutional referendum, another referendum lost.

Meloni did wisely not tie her own future to the outcome of this referendum as Matteo Renzi did

in the last decade, but it's a setback for her, having lost this

referendum by a very clear margin of 54 to 46%. Jack, what shall we make of this? Is this important?

Does it matter? Or is this the beginning of the end of Maloney or what lessons can we draw from this?

I personally wouldn't go so far as to say it's the beginning of the end of Maloney. I think that

Maloney's performance in elections that are likely to take place next year is contingent on a number

of other things and the justice referendum defeat doesn't necessarily bury her premiership entirely. I do think,

however, that it is a serious blow to her, and it's a sign that something is going wrong with

her premiership and with this government. So to give a little bit more detail on what was being

voted on, in contrast to say, Mateo Renzi's

2016 referendum, which was about basically the balance of power between Italy's two houses

of parliament, which is a serious and widely discussed political issue in Italy, this referendum was

about a more obscure issue, which was about how Italy's judicial system operates.

Specifically, it was about whether career pass for judges and prosecutors should be within one track or whether they should be separated.

That was the most important crux of the issue, right?

So this had been a bit of a hobby horse of Italy's right for quite a while,

at least since, you know, Silvio Berlusconi's premiership. And it's frankly a relatively obscure

issue in the grander scheme of things. And I think because it's a relatively obscure issue and also

because there was a bit of an air of the constitutional reform being self-serving. It turned into a broader

plebiscite, I guess you could say, on Maloney's premiership. And if you take it as that, the results were

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