OOC: Part of being quarantine is being so bored that you come up with a list of PMs for Italy, the long-neglected eighth member of TTL's G8.
Prime Ministers of Italy (since 1993)
1993-1994:
Carlo Ciampi (independent)
1994-1995:
Giancarlo Marconi (Forzia Italia)
1995-1996:
Giuseppe Zedda (independent)
1996-2001:
Lorenzo Roatta (Democratic)
2001-2006:
Giancarlo Marconi (Forzia Italia)
2006-2013:
Anthony Vercetti (Forzia Italia)
2013-2014:
Mario Ciucci (independent)
2014-
0000:
Manuele Boschetti (Democratic)
Basically Italy is the same as OTL until the
Mani pulite scandal upends politics and destroys the previously-dominant Christian Democratic Party. Ciampi is appointed as a technocrat, the first in Italian history, but not the last. He guides Italy for another year before his government collapses and new elections bring Giancarlo Marconi of the right-wing Forzia Italia ("Forward Italy") as the head of a center-right coalition government. Marconi can't keep it together for long, and Italy's president
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro is forced to bring in banker Giuseppe Zedda as Italy's second technocratic prime minister in three years. Zedda isn't very good at being prime minister, and Italy goes into its third election in six years after he's forced to tell Scalfaro that his government will lose a confidence vote in Parliament.
A center-left coalition led by the Democratic leader Lorenzo Roatta takes the reins and leads Italy into the new millennium. Unfortunately, Roatta spends so much time dealing with in-fighting and fending off coup attempts that by the time his five-year term is up, he's too exhausted to offer any real resistance to Forzia Italia and Marconi comes swaggering back into office. Marconi's populist touch and Italy's celebrated
hosting of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Rome keep Italian voters happy enough to ignore the slow creep of ministerial incompetence and the red flags journalists raise about the prime minister's "fundraising trips" to various resorts until the dam breaks in 2006 when Interpol arrests his private secretary for bringing prostitutes from around Europe to "fundraise" with the prime minister and his friends.
In the ensuing scandal, Marconi is forced to resign one step ahead of prosecution and the center-right picks Anthony Vercetti, the younger brother of former president Alcide Vercetti, as his replacement. Vercetti exceeds expectations in that he lets law enforcement roll up Marconi until the old disgraced pol is forced to plead guilty to embezzlement in exchange for a two-year sentence and permanent ban on serving in public office. But otherwise, he's quiet and mediocre. But after the past dozen years, Italians want a prime minister who isn't in the news constantly, either because his coalition is falling apart, or because people spotted the girlfriend of powerful Russian mobsters hanging out at his villa.
Vercetti lucks out and the late-2000s recession doesn't really hit Italy until after the 2008 election, giving his coalition five years to manage the economic fallout properly. They do
okay, in that the
Years of Lead don't make a return, but bad on most other metrics. The 2013 election leads to a complete mess in the wake of some serious and politically unpopular financial restructuring being necessary to get the economy out of the hole it fell into five years earlier. Once again, Italy turns to a technocrat to make the politically impossible task: economist Mario Ciucci is brought in at the head of a grand coalition that forces through restructuring that outrages most of the Italian electorate.
As expected, the grand coalition falls apart almost immediately afterwards and the new, charismatic and young Democratic leader Manuele Boschetti gets the nod after making the right populist noises while being sane enough to not promise to rip up the restructuring and cause an economic collapse. Boschetti's populism isn't just for show, though: his pitch of reducing the number of politicians in his plan to neuter the Senate and help stabilize Italian politics convinces
just enough Italians to support him. His economic policies, however, are not as popular, focused as they are on attracting foreign investment into Italy and reducing the country's large public debt. It's likely this that leads the center-left coalition to barely keeping their head above water in 2018 and retaining just enough support in the Chamber of Deputies to stay in power.