Italian President Giorgio Napolitano designated Enrico Letta the country’s new prime minister Wednesday, tasking him with forming a government after months of stalemate.
Letta “knows he has a very difficult task ahead of him,” Silvia Francescon, head of the Rome office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Trend Lines. “He said, ‘I feel the weight on my shoulders,’ and he is not sure if he can bear this weight, if his shoulders are strong enough.”
But as Francescon wrote in a blog post the day Letta was named, there is no alternative for a country so “hampered by critical weaknesses both in its economy and its administration.”