Italian intermission

In the gap between the fall of one Italian government and the establishment of another, there was a degree of uncertainty as to how ministers should respond. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the finance minister, cancelled a talk he was supposed to give to the European Policy Centre in Brussels on Tuesday (27 February) on the future of the eurozone – presumably because he was unsure as to whether he had a future as a minister. On the other hand, Interior Minister Giuliano Amato went ahead with a meeting of his Action Committee for European Democracy in Berlin. But Uwe Corsepius, EU affairs adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, declined to meet the group, which raised the question of why the European VIPs travelled to Berlin at all. Angel Gurría, the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening (21 February) just as Prime Minister Romano Prodi was resigning. Gurria went ahead with meetings the next day with Prodi, Padoa-Schioppa and Massimo D'Alema, the foreign minister, but one official admitted that they had seemed “a little distracted”.