Draghi’s capitalist model that recast Italy is running aground

The list of recent interventions by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s (pic) government is already long, with the populist Five Star movement in particular pushing its left-wing Democratic Party partners hard for even more of a state role.

ON June 2,1992, Italy’s then-chief Treasury official, Mario Draghi, stepped aboard Queen Elizabeth II’s yacht, Britannia, docked near Rome, to ask a group of British bankers for help in slimming down the country’s bloated public sector.

Almost three decades later, and a year since he left as European Central Bank president, what became one of the region’s biggest privatisation programmes is now in reverse.