Hello, my name's David Rundsenman 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 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

...