Il Times loda Tremonti

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/bronwen_maddox/article7081887.ece

But a bigger reason for voters’ indulgence is that Italy has fared surprisingly well in the global financial turmoil. Let me be more precise — it is not that Mr Berlusconi has run the economy well, but that he appointed Giulio Tremonti as Finance Minister in May 2008 and had the wit to keep him in place. Mr Tremonti, a good candidate for Europe’s best finance minister, has turned a near-disastrous position into a survivable one.
Italy had seemed to be heading for the position of Greece: unable to trim its huge public sector or to persuade people to pay more tax, hemmed in by debt and in serious danger of showing that a country which had adopted the euro could crash out of the currency bloc. Asked how craftsmen in northern Italy would compete against cheap Chinese handbags and shoes, ministers would say weakly: “But we make nicer ones.”

No longer. Italy has navigated the two years without collapse in finances or huge panic about its debt.