EU’s scapegoat: Berlusconi was not the problem

Silvio Berlusconi’s throwing in of the towel as Italy’s PM will not solve the country’s problems by itself, policy and development specialist Paolo Raffone told RT. The core of Italy’s woes is a lack of growth, which is inspired from abroad.

Comparing the political situation in Italy to the one in Greece, Raffone, who is the founder of the policy and development CIPI Foundation, issued a warning in his interview with RT:“Italy is used as a scapegoat very easily, because of the peculiarity of its Prime Minister. He may have been a problem at a certain point for his attitude, but it is not the real issue at stake now. The point at stake is the role of Italy as a nation. In fact this way of acting towards a sovereign state can backlash very harshly on the European system. If things continue to progress the way they do at present, the system may well collapse, creating chaos instead of a solution,” Raffone said.In his view, what is happening is an attempt to force Italians into changing their government with a more complacent one” Raffone also hinted that the country’s problems “go far beyond the case of Mr. Berlusconi himself”.“What we see on the financial vine is the effect of a very strong speculative movement that has been going on for several months over the Italian economy and Italian state,” Raffone explained “The resignation of Mr. Berlusconi has been pushed if not forced from the outside of Italy, claiming that the debt/GDP rate was unsustainable. In fact the problem of Italy is of course the debt, but the major one is the absence of growth, which is imposed by various policies at the European level mostly by the German decision on how to handle the monetary union”.“If a government of a coalition or a national unity is somewhat imposed on a nation, this does not reflect the will of the population at all, and the measures that will be undertaken by the government will be very hard on the people,” Raffone warned.