Premier Matteo Renzi on
Monday called on Italian-American entrepreneurs to give the home
country a hand as it struggles shed its old, entrenched ways in
order to reform.
"I'm changing Italy, you're changing the world," Renzi told
researchers and founders of 150 start-ups at the San Francisco
Yacht Club.
"Change is impossible with a narrow, backward-looking
mindset," said the premier, who was in San Francisco before
attending a United Nations climate change conference on Tuesday.
"I'm not asking you to come back...I'm asking you to help
us," Renzi said. "We need reform but we also need ideas. I'm
here to listen," the premier added.
"We are doing everything possible to change Italy into a
simpler country, with a different labor market and a streamlined
political class - one we no longer need be ashamed of," Renzi
said.
Italy's premier has no masters, and this means Italy is
changing, he added.
"If the premier is free of godfathers and masters it's a
sign that Italy has grown tired of certain rituals and a certain
way of doing politics," Renzi said.
"We might fail, but as Silicon Valley teaches us, failure
is how we learn to do better," the premier said.
"This an extraordinary chance to stop crying over spilled
milk," Renzi went on.
"Italy is a great country with some incredible weak spots,"
he added. "At some point, you come to a place where you have to
make some people angry" in order to push vital reforms through.
He was echoed on the home front Monday by President Giorgio
Napolitano, who told 3,000 students that now is not the time to
moan, but to be bold.
"New, courageous policies for growth and employment" are
needed if Italy and Europe are to emerge from a deep economic
and social crisis, the president said in a ceremony marking the
beginning of the new school year.
"Today not only Italy, but the whole of Europe, is
grappling with a profound crisis," he said.
"Clearly, this is not the time to huddle within our old
national enclosures and moan about the EU, but to come together
in a common effort," he said.
While the two leaders argued the worth of looking forward
instead of back, internal dissenters from the premier's
Democratic Party (PD) rattled their sabers as they gathered
Monday to write amendments to an enabling law to the premier's
signature Jobs Act, a provision of which looks to be generating
a split within the ranks.
The battle is to be played out on the Senate floor, where
the bill lands on Tuesday.
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