Rome run: Meloni’s surprising stamina

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0:41Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:55When you hear about trains not running on time, I bet one of the last countries you think of is Germany. But apparently its famous punctuality is a bit of a myth. Our correspondent considers what it'll take to get the railway back on track. And if you think the World Conquer Championship sounds like a bit of fun, think again. What started as a popular playground game is now serious business, complete with fake and doctored conkers. Don't know what I'm talking about? You've got a treat in store.

1:33First up though

1:45When Giorgio Maloney was elected Italy's Prime Minister to many people she seemed a risky choice Next week she'll have been in office for three years In a country that used to change its government an average of once a year, that's an impressive feat. Only one prime minister since the Second World War has served a full five-year term. Defying expectations, Maloney's on track to be the second. When Giorgio Maloney came to power as Italy's prime minister, a lot of people were concerned that given her background in the neo-fascist movement, that she would impose on Italy illiberal democracy along the lines of Hungary or Turkey.

2:31John Hooper is our Italy and Vatican correspondent. That really has not materialised and there's a widespread perception, I think, that she's doing pretty well. She is coming to three full years in office making her government the third longest serving in Italy's Republic. John, before we come to how she's doing now, just remind us how someone whose background was in the neo-fascist movement became Italy's prime minister. Her party was regarded as very marginal up until just a few years ago. She began as a politician and she never has been anything but a politician. In her teens, she joined the now defunct neo-fascist movement and she rose through the ranks to become the youth leader of its successor movement.

3:37She was a deputy in parliament before the age of 30. She was a minister in the government at the youngest age of any in the Italian Republic. And then she broke with the man who brought her into government, the late Silvio Berlusconi, and was one of the founder members of the Brothers of Italy movement, of which she became the leader in 2014. Now, you say that many expected she would rule in an illiberal manner. How has she actually done? What's she done? Well, the key, I think, to the view that she has done well is the fact that Italy, a country often mocked for its political instability, has been an island of stability in a Europe that has seen turmoil in France, for example, and plenty of instability in Germany and Spain and elsewhere.

4:45Added to that, there has been very little Euroscepticism in Georgia Meloni's rhetoric. And she has provided solid backing for Ukraine, allaying fears that she might ally with the Russophile far right. So as you say, it's a pretty amazing phenomenon in Italian politics to actually stay in her job. What's she doing differently from her predecessors? I think that she has a lot more political skill than many of them. She's an excellent campaigner, and it was partly due to her skills as a campaigner that the right won an absolute majority in parliament, which in turn is the key to Italy's political stability over recent years.

5:41And she has been deft in keeping on board and within her alliance a party that is further to the right than hers, the League under Matteo Salvini, and another that is closer to the centre, Forza Italia. Having said that, her government has been long on stability and short on action. But that, to some extent, is part of her secret, that if you don't do too much, it means that you don't upset too many people. And she has been very clever at targeting for unpopular measures people who would never dream of voting for her anyway. Doing nothing as a political strategy doesn't really sound like the way to be a successful government, though, long term.

6:41No, she's been extremely lucky, though, because ever since she came to power, there has been a tidal wave of money rolling through the Italian real economy. Part of it has come from the government because a previous government set up a ludicrously generous home improvement scheme that will, by the end, have rained more than 200 billion euros on the economy out of the public purse. And in addition to that, there has been almost another 200 billion coming from the EU's post-pandemic recovery fund in the form of both loans and grants. So that has certainly helped the Italian economy to recover, but not to grow to the extent that some had expected.

7:43In fact, on the basis of the figures for the second quarter, it's actually shrinking. And this could be Herakili's heel going forward. It may not because the reforms that Italy has had to carry out as a condition of receiving all of this EU large X will take time to have an effect. But for the moment, the situation is, if not worrying, disquieting. And John, I wanted to ask you about immigration, which we know is a huge issue for Italy, as it is for much of Europe and elsewhere. We've reported on the show before about Maloney's attempts to send migrants to have applications processed in Albania.

8:31What's happening with that? The scheme at the moment is blocked by the courts, and most recently by the European Court of justice. And that is a problem for the government. Having said that, the EU has passed legislation which will come into effect next year that may mean the scheme can be reopened. In this respect, too, the government has been lucky. The EU negotiated a deal with Tunisia which is largely responsible for the fact that the arrivals by sea in Italy have gone down by around 60%. But having said that, we're talking about a very sizable figure still. But one, I think, important point is that in her dealings with this very, very sensitive issue, Melanie, while often railing against the courts, has respected their decisions.

9:39And I think that that is an indication of the fact that she is only prepared to go so far and that if she were to impose a more radical agenda defying the courts, that she realizes that she may lose the support of the Forzitalia party center-right in her governing alliance, and that would bring her government down. John, thank you so much for talking to me. My pleasure.

10:42We'll see you next time. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

11:07I'm on platform 7 of the Berliner Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station here. The ICE 597 train to Munich has just departed about 10 minutes late. It's not an unusual experience for rail passengers in Germany. Tom Nuttall is our Berlin bureau chief. In fact, complaining about the trains here in Germany has become almost a national sport. Sometimes shocks outsiders who thought that this was a place that was obsessed with punctuality and efficiency. The trains are a disaster. The punctuality record has been going from bad to worse. Last year, about 40 % of trains ran late, and the figure has been getting worse every year.

11:56Germany is close to the bottom of the European League table when it comes to the punctuality of its trains. And for the growing ranks of Germans who complain that nothing works in the country anymore, you'll find that trains are almost always at or close to the top of the list. Tom after all that I feel I should congratulate you for making it to this recording on time but tell me is this Germany wide this problem with the trains? It absolutely is and in fact it's specific to the long distance trains as it happens the local trains regional trains trains within cities including Berlin where I am right now are basically fine have pretty good records.

12:36It's those so-called ICE, Intercity Express trains, that are the cause of so much angst in Germany. And what's anyone doing to try and sort that out? So there have been endless plans and strategies to try to turn this around for years. The latest was unveiled on September the 22nd by the transport minister.

13:04He appointed a new CEO for Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned rail company. There are plans to lift the punctuality record to 70 % of long-distance trains running more or less on time by 2030. So that's five years hence. It might not sound very ambitious, but because there are all of these plans to renovate the biggest and most heavily used tracts in Germany, the expectation is that for many people, things are actually going to get worse before they get better. Now, I did speak to some experts and lobby groups around this, and most of them gave a kind of cautious welcome to the plan that was unveiled by the minister.

13:50They thought that he was demonstrating more political ownership of the problem than they had seen from these previous efforts. They also like the cut of the gin of the new Deutsche Bahn CEO. But this is a plan that's on a bit of paper at the moment. The real test is going to be, are they going to be able to meet these targets that they've given themselves? And are they? One of the good things is that there is now more money sloshing around. I think you and I, Marty, have spoken on this podcast before about the giant 500 billion euro fund for infrastructure that was agreed after the German election in February.

14:25A lot of that money is going to go into Deutsche Bahn. Germany's strict fiscal rules have in the past made it very difficult to find that money. But experts will tell you that this is not just about money. If you can't find the workers to do the work that needs to be done on the railway, if you can't deal with the bureaucracy that so often these projects get snarled up in, then what you might see is that all of that money just goes into stoking inflation. You get higher prices, which will be very frustrating for everybody. The good thing is that the government does seem to understand the scale of the problem and the degree to which it drives ordinary Germans absolutely mad.

15:05I remember talking to some people who were close to Friedrich Metz, who's now the chancellor before the election, and they said, we know that there are lots of grand things that we need to do around foreign and security policy and this, that and the other. But we also are deeply worried that ordinary Germans are losing faith in the ability of politicians to get anything done. And top of that list is fixing the train. So there is an understanding that there really needs to be a degree of political grip attached to this problem. So perhaps there are reasons for a little bit more optimism or maybe a little bit less pessimism than we've had in the past.

15:43And Tom, there's always a problem about how you make railways today actually make money, isn't there? Yeah, I mean Deutsche Bahn loses a fortune. it's a kind of strange arrangement where it is technically a private company but it's entirely owned by the state and under that arrangement for some people the priorities have been all wrong in the past so there's been too much focusing on routes that make money or the type of customer that makes money so business over tourism for example so that would be one major element of this strategy will be the extent to which we see changes in that approach to Deutsche Bahn's future orientation.

16:20It has these rail access fees that the infrastructure arm of Deutsche Bahn charges all of the customers that use it. And that includes the long distance part of Deutsche Bahn. There's one arm of the company charging another arm of the company a lot of money. And those access fees have been going up and up and up and up. So there are some concerns that that could start spilling over into higher fees for passengers, also to some routes being potentially cut. And we've spoken on the show before about the fact that the German economy has really been in a funk for years. Is this part of that general malaise?

16:57The answer is 100 % yes. Older Germans will remember that 20, 30 years ago, Deutsche Bahn actually worked rather well. And Germany was close to the top of the European League table when it came to punctuality and quality of service. and they have seen that deteriorate over the years. It feels like a very tangible sign of the deterioration of the public realm in Germany. And of course, that taps into these bigger questions of the German industrial model and German exporters not being able to compete as successfully as they have done in the past. And what felt like in an economy that might've been running on all cylinders 10 years ago, that now hasn't grown in real terms for about six years.

17:38So yes, the trains feel like a very kind of tangible example of things not working very well in Germany anymore. For my job, obviously, I travel around Germany. I take trains all the time. It's generally how I get around the country. Missed connections are a perennial problem. Sometimes I've even been dumped in the middle of nowhere in the countryside at sort of 11 o 'clock at night with no hope of reaching my final destination. Ironically, one of the good things about this is that it means if you're on your way to a meeting and you've been screwed by the trains and you've missed a connection and you're going to be an hour late and you have to call and say, I'm very sorry, I'm going to be late for this meeting.

18:15People will understand because everybody has experienced that problem itself. So it does mean that you always have a ready excuse for being late. Tom, really pleased you made it today. Thanks so much. Thanks, Rosie.

18:48If cricketer's leather on willow is the most English of sounds, there was a time in school playgrounds not long ago when a conker smashing against another conker came a close second. Andrew Rammer writes about Britain. Gathering in a field behind a pub in Northamptonshire The village of Southwark hosted the 58th annual World Conquer Championships Along with the other things you would expect to see at any English village gathering Such as Morris dancing And a fire engine from the local fire brigade for children to climb around

19:30A conker is the golf ball-sized seed of a horse chestnut tree. Basically, you just have a conker with a hole in on a string, three shots each, trying to smash the other guy's conker. After five minutes, there's no smash. Then it's sudden death, about one shot each, until somebody hits and somebody misses, and that's it. No one of a conker smashed in five minutes, but then incident death. I hit all of the shots, but then the other person missed three. Back in schools in the olden days, children would resort to many reasons to win the games. They might bake their conks in the oven, they might soak them in vinegar or leave them on the windowsill for a whole year and use the previous season's feast.

20:20There was a bit of scandal at last year's World Conquer Championships when fake steel conqueror was found in the octogenarian winner's pocket. This generated a flurry of viral publicity and press articles. The organisers this time around were very happy to milk that attention. They even set up a metal detector to jokingly test contestants as they were entering the ring.

20:53Conkers as a game is the fruit of two distinct historical events. For a start in the 17th century, we saw the introduction of the horse chestnut tree to Britain from the Balkans. It's not actually a native plant here. And then in the 19th century, we had the push for compulsory education under the Victorians, and this created a market for pastimes in the playground. In the 21st century, that history risks dying out. Over the decades, Conkers has gone from ubiquitous to all but extinct in England's schools. I spoke to a union representing headteachers and none of the schools represented on its national executive currently plays Conkers.

21:39nor do any of the children who were vying for the parallel junior contest that was taking place in Northamptonshire.

21:55Taking a break between rounds of the contest, I spoke to Natasha and Gareth, both tastefully dressed as nuns. It does genuinely hurt if you get wrapped up in the knuckles for the conker, So I suspect it's health and safety. I think if you were not took at school, at a junior school, with a bag full of conkers on strings... I think they'd be confiscated straight away, wouldn't they? Don't let you throw a door, would they? Number three in the pink cowboy hat has just swapped conkers. That's Jimmy Kane from Northampton. And he's playing number 12, also from Northampton, Julian Dickinson from the team Oakley's Nuts.

22:38With so many different ways that children can spend their time nowadays, from games consoles to TikTok on their phones, it's really nice to see a load of adults and children enjoying a wholesome game of conkers, trying to smash each other's nuts off the end of shoelaces for a few hours on a misty Sunday afternoon in Northamptonshire and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

23:14that's it for this episode of the intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow

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