The G20 Summit is at the starting line with G20 Leaders gathering in Rome on 30-31 October. The agenda of the Summit is loaded with pressing global challenges: vaccinations and access to healthcare, economic recovery and inequalities, climate change and green transition, trade, finance and digitalisation. But the G20 is a year-long multilateral effort. What has already been achieved during the Italian Presidency?
Recent investigations have uncovered an Italian group of anti-Semitic far-right extremists with an interest in Nazi occultism. According to investigators, they allegedly were involved in anti-vaccine campaigns, showed their willingness in planning acts of violence, and had contacts with Ukrainian ultranationalist forces.
Iraq's geostrategic importance for the European Union is mirrored by the growing interests of single European states. This is particularly true for France and Italy, who are indeed at the forefront of the European strategic relationship with Baghdad.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs plainly stated that the last G7 summit was a waste of resources. He believes the G7 should be discontinued as it is no longer representative nor effective as a policy forum. He noted that G7 countries dropped to 31% of global GDP in 2021 compared to 51% in 1980, whereas Asian developing countries moved from 9% up to 33%.
Mysterious and transparent, cautious but daring, cordial yet ferocious. In a few weeks’ time, Angela Merkel will bow out, leaving behind some unanswered questions about her true personality. She is Germany’s eight Chancellor since the birth of the Bundesrepublik. In the last seventy years, the Bundesliga counted only eight trainers, while the Berlin Philarmonic contented itself with seven directors. For Germans, stability is not an abstract idea, it’s a value to live by.
On the 7th of June 2021, Italian authorities announced they had dismantled a far-right group, called Ordine Ario Romano (“Aryan Roman Order”).
The Sahel region is the theatre for one of the most significant developments in Italian foreign policy in the last decade. As a consequence of the intersection between external shocks, domestic pressures, and internal reorganisations, Italy is testing new approaches, instruments, and strategies in the Sahel to further its national interest, which is understood as much in terms of national security as domestic stability and international status.
Italy’s new Prime Minister Draghi has made it clear that his government will be reformist and pro-European. In his remarks to Parliament when seeking a vote of confidence he laid out his government’s intention to focus on the structural issues that have dogged Italy’s economy over the last two decades.
Italy-China relations have experienced significant shifts since the beginning of President Xi Jinping’s mandate, partly following the differing “Chinese views” of governing coalitions over those years, and a widespread outdated perception of the need to adapt bilaterally to the so-called “China’s rise”. Those swings have resulted in a very confused perception of Italy’s “China policy” on the part of both China itself and Italy’s European partners.
On 22 January, Italian Police arrested a neo-Nazi sympathizer on terrorism-related offenses in the northwestern port city of Savona. Police also searched the houses of 12 other suspects across Italy, from Turin in the north of the country to Palermo in the south.
What are the main variables on which the success of Italy’s presidency of the G20 in 2021 depends? The question is particularly relevant with only a few days to go before the end of a year that has made the need for – and the absence of – effective global governance mechanisms so evident.
Having been on the increase in most parts of the world for some time, economic and social inequality have now become more acute across the European Union as well, in the wake of two severe crises: the global economic and financial crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic, both of which struck the region within the course of little more than a decade. Will rising inequality trigger a new wave of protests, social radicalisation and political instability? It is likely to do so, but unlikely to be accompanied by traumatic effects and political regime changes.