Wealth & Money Quote by Romano Prodi

A politician listing oppositions is usually a safe move; Prodi makes it feel like an indictment. The power of his line is its rhythm: a drumbeat of binaries that turns “Italy” from a romantic brand into a fractured ledger. Each pair is familiar enough to be undeniable, but stacked together they suggest something sharper than mere diversity: a nation trapped in permanent segmentation, where identity is organized as grievance and policy becomes triage.

The opening split, “us and them,” is deliberately vague, a rhetorical master key. It can mean voters and elites, natives and immigrants, secular and Catholic, left and right. Prodi refuses to name the “them” because the point is the habit of othering itself: Italian politics, he implies, has become a machine that manufactures enemies to avoid shared responsibility.

Then he tightens the focus into Italy’s most durable fault line: “north and south.” That phrase carries a century of economic imbalance, internal migration, stereotypes, and resentment about taxation and state capacity. By placing it alongside “rich and poor” and “employed and unemployed,” Prodi frames the territorial divide as inseparable from material conditions, not folklore.

“Young and old” adds a quieter accusation: a generational contract gone sour, where pension protections and insider labor markets can leave younger Italians paying in and waiting out. Coming from Prodi, an EU-facing centrist associated with technocratic reform, the subtext is pragmatic and urgent: if Italy can’t stop narrating itself as rival camps, no coalition, no budget, no Europe-friendly modernization project will hold.