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many of which are political.
I'll be very happy if I could, with many others, contribute
at avoiding the train derailing.
This is the last beach. L'ultima spiaggia.
There is an opportunity to relaunch the country,
but we have to be very honest: it's almost the only chance.
Italy is a very fragmented economy and a very fragmented country.
We always talk about how journalists outside Italy
see things clearer than we see them here.
Well, being a little detached is good, and I think
what's important about this film is that it's a joint venture
between two journalists who are outside Italy,
one who's English and the other who is Italian.
How did that come to be? How did you get the idea of collaborating with
Annalisa in order to do the movie?
Well, when I was direttore of The Economist and we published
the infamous cover declaring Silvio Berlusconi unfit to lead Italy,
Annalisa was the first Italian journalist to come to interview me
about it, to report on it in L'Espresso,
whom she was correspondent in London for, and also La7,
and then amid the kind of huge storm that blew up about that cover
and I kept on being invited to Italy and realized
that we should carry on this campaign,
I started in a way returning the compliment by interviewing her about
what was going on in Italy, and how could I understand it,
and please explain this, and please explain that.
Then of course we published more covers, and she did more interviews,
and so we just began comparing views as two people from London
looking at this extraordinary series of events,
but then me trying to understand more fundamentally what was going on in Italy.
And then I decided in 2009 - 2010 to write a book,
and she also gave me a hand with that.
So that's where the idea of doing a film really began.
The main difficulty has been in distributing the movie.
We found that the initial reaction to GIAC by television companies,
by distributors, by really all of the establishment in Italy was negative,
they weren't interested, they didn't want to know about it,
they wanted to dismiss it as just simply the view of some foreigners,
some people outside Italy, not interesting, not really important.
So we were rejected by 3 film festivals, no TV companies were interested.
But now things have changed: we find that we've been shown on Sky Italia,
we're being shown on La7 soon, we've had a very successful tour of 15 screenings,
and planning a lot more, now people are interested, and I think
this is very encouraging but also revealing about the way in which
Italian establishment doesn't like outside ideas,
and doesn't like ideas and views that might be uncomfortable for it.
But we will keep on.
In the film GIAC someone remained very perplexed by the choice of the protagonists
of Good Italy, such as Elsa Fornero, who has been a symbol of the injustices of the past government,
and Sergio Marchionne, who forgets that if FIAT still exists, it is not because of his merits,
but because of past politics, which have put the automobile industry
at the center of the development of the country.
What do you think about that?
The first thing to say is that this film was made in the perido between Novemebr 2011 and april 2012, so all our filming was in that time
and was taking a picture of a particular moment of transition from the Berlusconi administration to the technical government,
from financial crisis to some kid of change and some kind of beginning of reform,
but we didn't know then what was going to happen, of course.
The chioce of our protagonists was made on the knowledge of what was true then.
In the case of Elsa Fornero, I think it is very wrong to consider her to be a source of injustice.
You may remember that she cried in her press conference in December 2011
about the measures that she was having to make on pensions.
The reality is that this government inherited a debt of 120 % GDP,
a problem of crisis, the stability of the italian government
and of its ability to finance its debts through foreign borrowing,
which is what half of the financing of the Italian government comes from,
and with a debt that was built up in the 1980s by political decisions
to run budget deficit of 10% every year for 20 years, 70s and 80s
and to establish a situation where 15% of GDP is spent of pensions.
Now that I've said that, I wonder if I mean 15% of public spending.
I will check that in a moment.
The much largest part of public spending is in pensions.
The government, if it was dealt with a crisis, it needed to cut the budget to deficit
in order to stabilize the situation, really had no choice but to do some changes in pensions.
So i don't think it's right to consider Elsa Fornero
as a principle source of injustice.
I think that the injustice arises from high level of public debt,
from the tax evasion, that has produced the situation that Italy finds itself in,
the excessive public spending, which explains the situation that Italy finds itself in,
and the parliamentary resistance to measures to cut public spending
or to raise taxes in other ways, which the Monti government faced.
so this government did not have free choices.
So I think that that's unfair.
How about Sergio Marchionne and FIAT?
Many people ask us this question and say that FIAT was rescued and supported by the
Italian government in the past and therefore it should somehow behave in some special way today.
Well, one fact which I think this question forgets is that this support ended
in the early 90s, when it was ruled illegal by the EU state aids program
and also the protected Italian market which gave FIAT privileged
right to sell cars in Italy was also ended with the single market program of the EU in the early 1990s.
So that's more than 20 years ago.
Now, Sergio Marchionne is CEO of FIAT, he arrived in 2006 I think it was, or 5
when the company was in crisis, when it had gone through 5 chief executives in 5 years,
and in the following 8 years he has stabilized and rescued the company
and returned it to profit.
so I don't think it is quite unreasonable of him as having done something
quite significant for his company, the question then is whether
you should consider him to be doing something for the country
that is of course another question
we interviewed him because he seemed to us to be trying to be at that time a change maker,
a man who was trying to break up the established system between Confindustria and the trade union federations, about how labor contracts were negotiated, about how industrial policy
was being conducted in Italy.
And wanted to move to a more German or other European model, where things
were decided at company level and according to international competitive practices.
Also he bought Chrysler using subsidies from the American government
and has turned Chrysler back into profit, succeeding where the Germans failed before him.
So here's an Italian company that is doing better than the Germans.
so I find it surprising that Sergio marchionne is demonized in Italy.
of course he could fail tomorrow, of course he could be shown in the coming months and yearsto have taken the wrong strategy for FIAT.
I am not trinyg to predict the future.
But I think it is surprising to me as an international journalist
that Sergio Marchionne personally is demonized in Italy given what he's tring to do for his comapny
and change that he is trying to bring to his country.
Lately in Italy Stiglitz and Krugman are taken as reference by political movements, especially the most radical political movements, to confirm the failure of austerity politicsin our country, and indicate possible alternative ways.
Since you know Italy so well, don't you think they lack realism in our specific case?
Maybe here we need less cold economical recipes and more good politics?
I certainly think that Italy needs more good politics.
It's had very bad politics for many years, and certainly for most of the past decade
I think the theories of Stiglitz and Krugman are best seen at an European Union level,
not just an Italian level, because I agree we them, that this kind of single minded,
cold focus on austerity as the only path, the only policy, is basically a road to disaster,
a road to both political disaster and to economic disaster at an European level.
But if you have a debt that is 2.6 trillion euro,
and you need to keep refinancing it with borrowing from abroad,
you do have to run a fiscal policy that corresponds in some way to that situation.
Alongside it I think that what's needed is a politics of liberation,
a politics that recognizes the real obstacles to economic activity,
to enterprise, to innovation, to creativity in Italy,
that have been built up over the last 20 years.
And that's what Matteo Renzi has been saying in his speeches about PD policy,
that seeks to make Italy "pių semplice, pių aperta",
more liberated, so that people have more room to start new things,
to do things and not be confronted with so many obstacles,
many of which are political.