Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to continue

our tour of the world's democratic trouble spots. We did the United States last week, we did

Brazil at the weekend, today we're going to do Italy and we're probably going to get to France

and we might just mention the UK.

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I have with me today Helen Thompson who knows a great deal about European political economy,

Chris Bickerton who knows a great deal about European political institutions and

Lucia Rubinelli who knows about European political thought and also knows a lot about Italian

politics. Two things happened last night, one and this is Wednesday morning I should say,

it's always Wednesday morning on this podcast. Almost always.

Almost always except when it's not. One was we think there is potentially the makings of an

agreement between the EU and the UK government and now we have to see if the UK government can hold

together and we don't know so maybe we'll touch on that at the end. The second thing that happened

last night was the EU set the Italian government a midnight deadline to come up with a new budget

because the EU has rejected the Italian budget as having breached its rules and the Italian

government let that deadline pass and wrote back and said we're not budging and so in one of these

stories there is the makings of an agreement and in the other of these stories there is a growing

...