Prime Minister of Italy (2016 – 2018) - Paolo Gentiloni
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Theresa May’s European parliamentary elections could be a defining moment in the struggle for the EU's future; a continent wide clash between the forces of liberalism and populism exists - perhaps best personified by French President Emmanuel Macron up against Hungary's Viktor Orban. HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur speaks to Italy’s former centre-left Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. Politically he’s with Macron, but his country is led by populists sympathetic to Viktor Orban. Whose message is resonating with European voters?
Image: Paolo Gentiloni (Credit: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.1 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today bears the scars of a career in the turbulent world of Italian politics. Paolo Gentiloni was a stalwart of |
| 0:23.4 | the centre-left Democratic Party, which took power after the political demise of Silvio Berlusconi. |
| 0:30.2 | He was an MP, served as foreign minister, and then as prime minister from December 2016. But in the |
| 0:36.6 | spring of last year, he led his party to a disastrous |
| 0:39.6 | electoral defeat at the hands of Italy's populists. Italy's political elite watched aghast as a fragile |
| 0:46.7 | coalition of the five-star movement and the right-wing league formed the new government. Nine months on, it is clear that Italy's embrace |
| 0:56.0 | of populism is part of a much wider European phenomenon. Years of economic stagnation and |
| 1:02.0 | rising resentment over immigration have created a powerful politics of anger. In a couple of months, |
| 1:09.4 | the EU will stage European parliamentary elections. |
| 1:12.6 | Italy's interior minister, Matteo Salvini, says it'll be a battle defined by attitudes to immigration. |
| 1:20.6 | That's certainly what he and fellow nationalists like Victor Orban in Hungary would like it to be. |
| 1:26.6 | So how do the politicians of Europe's political |
| 1:29.2 | mainstream fight back? Well, Paolo Gentiloni joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Let me ask you a very |
| 1:37.7 | simple question. Do you feel like a stranger in your own land today, just one year after that election |
| 1:43.8 | which you lost so resoundingly? |
| 1:46.2 | No, you could never feel stranger in your country. Obviously, I'm not talking for the Italian government. |
| 1:54.8 | But it's not like a normal switch between parties. This was a massive change, almost a revolution in the political |
| 2:03.0 | culture in Rome. For the first time, we had anti-politicians who were voted into office |
| 2:10.2 | in Rome. Yes, and something happened in this nine months after the new government took office. |
| 2:20.8 | These two forces changed very much their relation of forces. |
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