Hello my name is David Ransman and this is Talking Politics. This week finally we are going

to talk about Italy. Oh Italy.

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I'm joined this week by Helen Thompson by Chris Bickerton and it's a pleasure to welcome

Lucia Rubinelli who is a fellow in political thought at the LSE but also is Italian and

has written a lot about Italian politics and what we're going to try and do is work out how we

got to where we are now because this is a complicated picture and if we recorded this episode last

week it would have been out of date within about 12 hours of being broadcast so we're doing it at the

point where it settled down a little but we're not sure how much and then we're going to talk about

what the implications are for the rest of Europe and we want to touch on Spain too because there's

new government there as well. Lucia so one of the questions for an outsider that was really hard to

work out is there was a long period where it looked like it wouldn't be possible to form the

government because the election had produced this very confusing result where the two populist

parties were the dominant parties and yet they didn't seem to have much in common and then we got

to a point where they had reached some kind of agreement that allowed them to form a government so

just tell us what you think was the coming together so the five-star movement and the league

and their two leaders demio for the five-star movement Salvini for the league.

...