Italy fights a brutal battle to reform itself

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi faces an up-hill challenge in pushing through tough economic reforms.

"Nobody ever said that reforming Italy would be easy," says Gideon Rachman on FT.com. "But Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, is going through a series of brutal tests this month as he fights on two fronts, in Brussels and Rome."

The tussle with Brussels is budget-driven. At the latest European Union summit, Italy was hit with a demand for an additional EU budget contribution.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.