Italy’s prime minister has pleaded for Germany and other creditor countries to do more to help lower his country’s borrowing costs, warning there would be a “powerful backlash” among voters in the eurozone’s struggling periphery if they did not.
In an interview just three days after his country’s debt was downgraded two notches by Standard & Poor’s, Mario Monti said he did not dispute the vast majority of the rating agency’s diagnosis of Italy’s problems.
But he argued its analysis supported the tack he was taking. He singled out S&P’s citing “one negative” political risk factor: “European policymaking and political institutions”, not his technocratic government.