Transcript
FEDERIGA BINDI:The first thing is that usually legislatures last 5 years in Italy, after a 2 years we get a new general election. This is not very frequent in Italy and we have had lots of governments, but usually the legislatures went almost to the end, and you can see it will be the fiftieth time we vote since 1948, and the fifty-seventh executive from 1948. I left out the eight which run from 1943 to 1948 which is before the constitution was drafted. So you can see that we have had a government -- but elections were less recurrent. And by the way, it's only the second time that (inaudible) of the government started in parliament. You know that in principle in Europe we have (inaudible) relations between the executive and the legislative, but in Italy only two times it happened that the government was voted down because of a vote in parliament out of 57, two out of 57, and both were with President Prodi. So he is the only one we managed to be (inaudible) with a vote in parliament.
The first question which you then would have is why. Why do we have elections here. Maurizio and myself were among the two who were betting on elections since a long time, but although the government has been shaky since the beginning, not everybody would agree. The situation is too sad so either we cry or we laugh. The guy in the middle is called Mastella and he is the one who is the (inaudible) of the crisis. His wife is what we will call in Italian -- the Italian Hillary. So he has been a long-standing politician and his wife has been helping him in his political life and a certain point she decided she would run on her own and she became president of the Campana Region which is a tricky region. Mastella, he was the Minister of Justice, on the day he was to present a report on justice in Italy for the last year, during the night Ms. Mastella was notified by the judiciary that she was under inquiry and she had to stay at home. She couldn't leave home because she was under inquiry. So the next day Mastella was to present the state of Italian justice in Italy, actually made a very passionate speech saying that it was unbelievable what happened to his wife and started the crisis.
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