Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking about two of our favorite subjects, France and Italy.

Where are they with Covid? Where are they with their politics? Where are they with Brexit?

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Joining me today is Chris Bickerton, expert in European politics and Lucia Rubinelli, political theorist, but also she knows a lot about Italy and Lucia.

Tell us where you are today. I am in Trieste, which is a very beautiful and decadent city on the border between Italy and Slovenia.

And decadent is what we want. I say this every week. We never know where we are with Brexit. I mean I'm presumably one day, we'll know where we are.

But I thought this week maybe we would be there, we're not. But how does it look from Italy?

I mean what is the feeling among the Italian public, among Italian politicians about the sort of dance between Johnson and Fondaline?

If I have to be honest and I think that will be quite disappointing to the British public, I think that the Italian public debate is sort of fed up with Brexit.

And there's not much debate about it going on really in the sense that I was looking before coming on the podcast. I was looking back at comments from political leaders about Brexit in say the last month or so.

And the only one I could find is a very short comment made by Selvini in parliament, where he basically says, oh, you all told us that living the European Union would be a disaster for the UK.

But look at them, they are living the European Union and they are the first to have a vaccine.

So basically this is the only comment an Italian political leader has made on Brexit. And of course, I mean Selvini is still somehow playing with the idea that Brexit is a good idea for the UK and that

living the EU wouldn't be a disaster for Italy. But it's not serious as probably it was or he pretended it to be a few years back.

I think that now it's just some sort of provocation that he's dropping in the mix.

Again, let's come back to Selvini because we always have to do our little Selvini slot. But the British newspapers imply that there is a kind of alliance of hawkish countries who want to push a really hard bargain with the UK and potentially risk no deal being made by France or come to cross some France in a second.

Italy is listed as one of the countries that's willing to line up behind Macron on phishing and other things. Is that at all plausible? I mean, I take it there's not a huge debate going on about phishing in the Italian Parliament.

No, exactly. But no, I think that's right in the sense that all the signals that have come out in the past few months about Brexit from government especially are all pointing to the fact that Italy one is lining with with France and with Macron when it comes to the Brexit negotiations.

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