Premier Matteo Renzi talked up
Italy's business and cultural credentials and took a swipe at
compatriots who grumble about the country, as he met Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on Monday.
"Loving Italy means you stop shooting at it," Renzi said
as he continued a packed programme on the second day of a visit
to Japan.
The comments were interpreted as a swipe at the critics
back home to Renzi's ambitious reform programme, including
lawmakers on the left wing of his centre-left Democratic Party
(PD).
Tension between the government and the PD rebels has been
high in recent days, amid talk of party rebels using "Vietcong"
tactics against the administration after several PD Senators
contributed to a defeat for the executive last week over part of
its reform of State broadcaster RAI.
After meeting Abe, Renzi said that Italy and Japan "share
cultural values but also strategic values in (our) economic and
geopolitical vision".
Renzi is said to be an admirer of Abe's so-called
Abenomics, policies based on fiscal stimulus, monetary easing
and structural reforms, and has repeatedly called for the EU to
grant more scope for growth-stoking investment, rather than
demanding strict application of budget rules.
"Prime Minister Abe joins us in the idea that development
comes not only by austerity but by growth and by investments,"
Renzi said earlier on Monday in a speech to a university
audience.
"We are partners and friends...and share cultural values".
He returned to this theme after meeting Abe.
"We belong to the G7 and G20 and we often have shared
positions, and it is important to continue in this direction,"
Renzi said.
The premier pledged that Italy will work hard for a
Japan-European Union free trade deal.
"It is a win-win operation," Renzi said.
The premier stressed that, thanks in part to government
reforms, Italy was "open to business".
He also said that Italian State-controlled defense and
aerospace giant Finmeccanica was important for relations between
Italy and Japan.
"Finmeccanica has chosen Hitachi as its partner," Renzi
noted, saying the Italian conglomerate had many opportunities in
the country "especially after that proactive pacifism that Abe
has explained to us with the helicopters manufactured with
Kawasaki, as well as a number of opportunities".
In February, Finmeccanica agreed to sell its controlling
stakes in Ansaldo STS, which designs and manufactures railway
signalling systems, and Ansaldo Brera, a rail transport
engineering company, to Japanese multinational Hitachi.
The two leaders also announced that they had reached a
preliminary agreement on "information security".
Renzi's absence from his homeland did not prevent him
being at the centre of domestic attention.
Indeed, crusading anti-mafia writer and Campania native
Roberto Saviano tweeted Monday he is "pained the tragic
situation in Italy's South should be so easily defined as
whining".
The remark came after Renzi said Sunday in Tokyo "enough
whining about the South - let's roll up our shirtsleeves".
In an open letter to Renzi published on La Repubblica daily
Saturday, Saviano called on Renzi to "act quickly" to save the
impoverished South, where "even the thread of hope has been
broken".
"Those who flee the South are no longer just those seeking
hope in emigration," Saviano wrote.
"Even the mafias flee the South now - they do not invest
but merely plunder...even the blood money the mafias used to
circulate in the 1990s is gone".
Saviano went on to tell the premier "you have a duty to
act. And before that, to admit nothing has been done to the
present day. This is the only way we can recover hope that
something can really get done".
His 2006 expose on the Naples-area Camorra mafia,
Gomorrah, brought Saviano death threats from the mob, forcing
him to live under State-provided armed guard ever since.
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