Hello, I'm Page and this is the Eurointelligence podcast covering current affairs in the EU and Eurozone.

I'm joined by Wolfgang and Susanna, directors of Eurointelligence in Oxford.

So this week we wanted to talk about Conte's hunt for his 10 senators. Wolfgang, how is that hunt going for him?

That's not going great for him at this moment, but there's still a few days. They have a kind of a deadline in the middle of next week.

A very important legislation is going to the Senate next week, which is a legislation to reform

the criminal justice system.

And what is happening in Italy is that Italy has like other countries, also statutes of limitations for criminal offenses, except that in Italy, trials, criminal trials with the entire appeal procedures take a very, very long time. And the statute of limitations is backdated to the date of the alleged crime and effective until the final verdict

of the appeals procedure and many criminal trials can last beyond the statute of limitations.

And there was a statistic that in 2018, 130,000 criminal cases were dismissed on those grounds.

So if in Italy you get in conflict with the law, you have a reasonable chance to get away with it,

especially if you have a good legal team that exhaust the entire criminal system.

So they want to reform this.

This is a five-star project because five-star is

very much an anti-corruption world. So this is a very, very important piece of legislation

for, especially for five-star. It's the under justice minister Bonafeda, who is one of the five-star,

you know, five-star ministers. And it's not clear that the government has a majority for that.

Renzi didn't vote against Conti in the confidence vote.

His senators abstained.

So Conti nominally passed the threshold.

So he didn't have to resign that day.

But Renzi will and his team will vote against this justice reform.

A lot of people initially have, especially in the political class,

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