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Amanpour

Interview with Italy's Prime Minister; Talking with the London Correspondent for the New York Times

Aired July 17, 2013 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour, reporting tonight from Buckingham Palace, where anticipation of a royal birth is bubbling over.

And even the Queen now wants her daughter-in-law, Kate, to hurry up, as she told a little girl today in the Lake (ph) District area of Britain.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you want Kate's baby to be a boy or girl?

ELIZABETH II, QUEEN OF ENGLAND: I don't think I mind. I would very much like it to arrive. I'm going on holiday.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Meanwhile, away from all that, the business of running the world continues. My guest tonight, Italy's prime minister, has one tough job to keep his country from collapsing.

Enrico Letta leads Italy at a very difficult time. His fragile ruling coalition could be rocked by political events at any moment. The economy's in trouble over debt and companies are closing, which relentlessly pushes up the unemployment rate, particularly among the youth.

All of this is causing real concern that the country could soon need a bailout, although the prime minister tells me that he's sure that can be avoided. He came to the post essentially by default, emerging after months of deadlock as the only possible acceptable candidate to lead an unprecedented coalition of the Left, the Center and Berlusconi's party of the Right.

Now as one of Italy's youngest prime ministers ever, Letta's main goal is, of course, to boost economic growth and to restore faith in government. He knows that Italians are fed up with the shenanigans of politics as usual.

Close to 90 percent of them don't trust their leaders, corruption being one of people's chief complaints. But Letta is making it clear that he is down to Earth. Perhaps he's taking a cue from Pope Francis, who put humility in vogue.

Letta drove himself to the presidential palace in his own Fiat to accept his mandate. He's a strong believer in the E.U., and he's here in London where he just wrapped up meetings with Prime Minister David Cameron to stress how important the U.K. is to the union.

And after that meeting, I sat down with the prime minister at the Italian embassy here in London to talk about Italy's many challenges and how he plans to tackle them.

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AMANPOUR: Prime Minister, welcome to the program.

ENRICO LETTA, PM, ITALY: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: So your big mission is to boost growth. You have a huge unemployment rate, particularly about 40 percent when it comes to youth. What are you going to do to stop this terrible catastrophe in your country and around Europe, but to stop the brain drain?

LETTA: Youth unemployment is really my nightmare. We are losing a generation and without this generation, there is no hope for the future of the country. This is why it is my priority. I , in this 70 days of government working, we approved a law cutting suddenly and in a very hard way the labor taxes for youth -- for jobs for youth.

If you are able to give job to an Italian below then 29 years old, you will not pay taxes nor contributions. It will be very, very, very easy.

AMANPOUR: And you've got the whole austerity problem as well. What do you do about that when that seems to be de rigueur around Europe?

LETTA: First of all, we think that Italy today is a virtuous (ph) country. We are out of the procedure of excessive deficit by the European Commission. Italian deficit is below 3 percent and our primary surplus is around 2.5 percent.

I think we are among the six, seven better European countries on that point. Of course, our problem is growth, unemployment, and we have a problem with the general debt. The main point is how to boost growth immediately.

This project on youth labor, cost, taxes cutting and also other main important issues on infrastructure, we passed a law for boosting infrastructure in Italy. We have in the south a big problem for infrastructure, is another main, main, very important achievement.

And I will present to the markets, to the international investors two years project named Bastinado (ph) Italia. That will be a project from now on until the Expo 2015 that will take place in Milan to attract investments because the next two years before Expo 2015 I want to have growth in my country.

AMANPOUR: Do you think that Italy will have to request a bailout?

LETTA: No. We don't need any bailout because we are among the few virtuous (ph) country in Europe. The decision of the commission was a very clear decision. We are below the 3 percent and we are able to take our account under control. We don't want to start again with deficit, debt and so on. We will remain with our budget under control.

AMANPOUR: You call yourself one of the few virtuous countries. You are, if not the youngest, one of the youngest Italian prime ministers and you have a problem, a crisis of government in your country, a crisis of confidence, rather, from the people towards government.

Polls show that only about 9 percent of the people approve of government. You yourself have talked about how parliamentarians and others need to post their salaries online and we're shocked to know that there's something like 1,000 parliamentarians in Italy, double the number of the United States, but a fifth of the population, and they earn huge amounts of money. And they get a lot of perks.

Is that something that needs to be attacked to give credibility?

LETTA: Yes, it is. That is why we -- one of the most important pillars of the activity of my government is reform of politics. The change of the constitution, we started the process to reduce the number of member of parliament, reduce to 400 from the thousand we have today, to have just one chamber, not two chambers and to have a system more efficient on that.

The first law I passed in my cabinet was a law eliminating the double salary for the prime minister and the ministers. I have a salary as member of parliament. I don't want a double salary. So it was a very important decision.

The next prime minister, if he wants to have double salary, he have to pass a new law having the second salary. But it will be, I think, very important for the country and also for me, because now I'm more free when I will nominate somebody in some important positions to say, OK. You have to cut your salary, too, because you can't have a salary 30 times or 40 times your prime minister.

AMANPOUR: Right. So what do you make of this whole new humility thing that's going around Italy and the world clearly Pope Francis introduced that on a megascale. He paid his own bill. He lives very modestly. He's constantly doing things that really are different.

You drove your own Fiat to work on the first day. What do you make of all of that?

LETTA: I think it's absolute necessity because there's a big change in the perception of the establishment, political institutions, politicians. We need to be very transparent. We need to be very clear and very easy in what we do. So I think these reforms will be absolutely -- people will understand this reform and people will ask for this reform.

So I am confident on that. Of course, this transparency needs to have decisions, fast decisions. But I'm confident that this new work (ph) is better than the past one.

AMANPOUR: Italy has a very prominent first black member, black cabinet member, and we were quite shocked to hear one of the senior Italian parliamentarians refer to her as an orangutan.

Should he be out of a job? Is that the kind of person we want as a parliamentarian in Italy?

LETTA: No, he has to go out from his job. And I asked him to resign. It was a shock for Italy and for, of course, all the public opinion. You know my choice to ask Cecile Kyenge to be minister was a choice very clear for the country. Italians has -- they have to understand that the internal integration is one of the main issues for the future.

And the message was very clear. Of course, there are today problems and I asked to this member of parliament to resign, is a shame, is really a shame. And I will continue to ask him to resign.

AMANPOUR: What keeps you up at night? What keeps you awake? What stops you from sleeping?

LETTA: The main nightmare really is the future of our youth. To see how many Italians are going out of Italy, the sort of exodus, a great generation leaving my country, I think is the worst nightmare for me as prime minister but also for the country, of course. So we have to work for give them the opportunity that they -- if not, they will try to get out of Italy.

AMANPOUR: Prime Minister, thank you very much for joining me.

LETTA: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: And if that doesn't seem like enough on his plate, the prime minister faces two looming threats to his fragile coalition, the firestorm enveloping his interior minister over a deportation case and the upcoming tax fraud ruling on the former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Mr. Letta tells me, though, that he's absolutely certain that neither will cause his government to fall.

And while Italy and Britain may share -- may not, rather, share a common currency, the euro versus the pound, they do share a keen interest in the private lives of their leaders, dating back to the days of the Medicis and the Tudors. So after a break, the public fascination and media frenzy surrounding Britain's royal baby as viewed through the eyes of an American correspondent in London.

How to stay focused when the whole country's obsessed with baby booties and baby names, when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program as we continue to stake out Buckingham Palace and the long wait for the royal baby. The 24-hour media watch is still on and this is one bit of breaking news that won't be tweeted out.

The official announcement will be a printed royal proclamation, posted on an easel to be placed for all to see in the palace forecourt behind me. The kind of quintessential anachronism, maybe, that keeps the visitors pouring into this country.

Indeed, there's already a baby bonanza, a veritable economic windfall piling up. And my next guest has written volumes, well, one volume to be precise, about what makes Britain so very British.

She is Sarah Lyall, and she's been London correspondent for "The New York Times" for the past 17 years. She's the author of "The Anglo Files," a funny and insightful compendium of the quirks and proclivities of the English as observed by an outsider who's deeply embedded in this culture.

Sarah, welcome.

SARAH LYALL, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Thank you very much.

AMANPOUR: It's great to see you again.

LYALL: Good to see you, too.

AMANPOUR: And I know that you are, in fact, now wrapping up your 17 years as a Britain watcher for "The New York Times," and heading back to the States. It couldn't be at a more typical moment.

LYALL: Well, absolutely not.

Well, it is (inaudible) of course babies always come; people always get married. And the Royal Family is an object of considerable fascination no matter what they do. It's a great family to watch, because it's sort of like the Kardashians of Britain, only they have such a mystique about them.

You know, they're not going to go on and talk about what the labor was like and how hard it is to lose the baby weight and does Kanye want to see me breastfeeding. So any little tidbit of information, everybody just eats up. You know, they say one banal little utterance, and it's the most fascinating thing that ever happened.

AMANPOUR: Even your august readers, even "The New York Times" readers are not immune from this thing that we're doing here.

LYALL: They're obsessed with it. It's unbelievable. It's (inaudible) in the Royal Family. People love to read about that stuff.

AMANPOUR: Well, OK. You brought up "Downton Abbey," and that is this best, best (inaudible) best seller. It's a really highly rated program, not just here but also in the United States, on public television and probably around the world.

It brings up something really interesting that you've written about and actually that involves whether this new baby will be the heir, no matter the sex.

The idea of primogeniture, that here in England, it has to be a male in most of the households which inherit the titles, the property of the landed gentry.

LYALL: That's right.

AMANPOUR: That is so outdated.

LYALL: It's ridiculous. Well, the idea was originally to keep these estates together. So the notion was you have to pass it all down to one person. And most of these titles, we're talking about the nobility and the peerage, people in the House of Lords.

So their titles would have been granted hundreds of years ago by some monarch to, you know, reward some crony. And at that time, women, were, you know, chattel. And it's just sort of passed on down and no one's ever done anything about it. So even if there's no boys in the family, if there's five girls, the title would pass to some cousin or somebody in Australia, you know, it's just the way it is.

AMANPOUR: And yet, it's not just a form of legal discrimination, it's really causing a lot of trouble within families. And it's coming, you know, to the fore. I think there's a bit of a movement, isn't there, by women in these families to try to change this.

LYALL: Well, there is. I mean, they say what it must be like, you know, you're growing up; you're the oldest child and you hear your mother continually say I wish I had a son. And then some son comes along and everyone's thrilled and you're sort of out in the cold.

And you know, in a nice family, they'll give you some money. But he'll get most of it. He gets the castle. He gets the nice house, all the estate. And you've got to go marry some other rich person or else you'll live very differently from the way you were raised.

AMANPOUR: And so in this case, the Royal Family, Buckingham Palace, is actually ahead of this. They've gotten ahead of this curve because the Queen has decreed that whatever the sex of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge's baby, that baby will be the heir.

LYALL: Well, more than just the Queen. It's -- Parliament has actually passed new legislation. So it's great. So no one's sort of going to say if this baby is a girl, oh, how sad; they'll have to get pregnant right away again and have a new child.

This will be the next monarch. But of course, it won't be; I mean, first, there's Prince Charles. Then there's William and then there's this baby. But maybe 50 years, you know, who knows.

AMANPOUR: So if Parliament has done it for the royal heir and the royal succession, what's stopping them doing it for the rest of -- ?

LYALL: Well, tradition, you know, it's a very traditional society here. And probably this last bastion of tradition are the older generation of the aristocracy. And they literally will say things like, well, we've always done it this way, so why would you do it another way? And they really are quite sexist.

AMANPOUR: And they have always done it this way and it's actually the whole idea of the Royal Family and the landed gentry and this great British tradition, which actually is a perpetual windfall for this country.

LYALL: Well, it really is. I mean, the Royal Family especially. I mean, you were talking a little bit about some of this baby paraphernalia, its clothes, its mugs, its, you know, tea towels, all sorts of things that are for sale. And you know, people are here watching all the time and coming to the changing of the guards and all these traditions, bringing the crowds.

AMANPOUR: But so society is changing today by royal assent, gay marriage, same-sex marriage is now permitted.

LYALL: Well, it just happened, didn't it? You know, it's so interesting here; it's really a consensual country. You definitely have differences among the political parties.

But you don't have the huge split and the rift between what in -- as we see in the United States, so for an issue like this, it wasn't as if there were people writhing in the streets or demonstrating. It happened pretty quietly. And you know, it seemed there was a little opposition but the government won and this is what's happened.

AMANPOUR: And you've written a lot about it; you have some pretty funny stories about what was going on in the House of Lords and other places while these debates were underway.

LYALL: Well, a few years ago, the House of Lords actually had to debate on whether or not to outlaw all the hereditary peers. And those would be the ones that had inherited their titles. And they could always be in the legislature. It was an inherited legislature. And so these people were debating and it was actually sort of sweet.

I mean, some of them were just completely unqualified to be in the legislature. And they were saying, well, you know, my family in the 15th century started to sit in this house and I take big responsibility and you know, I have a lot of experience running my estate. And so I -- you know, it was just -- it was amazing to hear it. It was like from another century.

AMANPOUR: You've written the book, "Anglo Files," a double entendre, obviously.

What is the most amazing thing that has struck you or the quirkiest thing or the most heartwarming thing, if I can put you on the spot.

(LAUGHTER)

LYALL: Well, you know, the thing about it is when you move to another country and you have these sort of stereotypes in your head of what it's going to be like, and in a way they're stereotypes because they're sort of true.

So it is true that British people are more reserved. It is true that they're obsessed with the weather. It is true that if you knock into them, they will apologize to you, that they're saying, "Sorry," all the time. But I don't think I was prepared for the warmth underneath all of that. You know, it takes quite a while, but people are very, very warm here in a way you wouldn't notice originally.

AMANPOUR: Absolutely.

And England is slightly different in many regards from the rest of Europe. Britain is slightly different. We just were talking to Prime Minister Letta. He's just been meeting with the British Prime Minister David Cameron who, as you know and have been reporting, is getting ready for perhaps a referendum in 2017 on whether to stay in the union.

He's under a lot of pressure from the increasingly right wing, I guess.

LYALL: Yes, yes.

AMANPOUR: Is there going to be a divorce between Britain and the union?

LYALL: I think that'll be really hard to accomplish. I just don't see it. I mean, they're so tightly connected in ways that most people here don't even realize. (Inaudible) referendums on Europe is they always are defeated, any time a treaty comes up in any country, and it's actually voted on, the country always defeats it.

So it's a -- he's getting himself in a real bind. I mean, this is a country that actually votes yes to divorce from Europe, I don't know what the government will do, quite honestly.

AMANPOUR: And just as you head back to the United States, this is a conservative government. It's called a conservative government, Tories. But that is not -- nothing like what the conservatives are in the United States. I mean, you might call British Tories sort of on the right of the Democrats. Are you prepared for such conservatism back in the U.S.?

LYALL: Well, that's the thing that's so striking, looking at America from abroad, is you see it through such different eyes. You see it through European eyes almost. And it is, you know, in the years I've been here, this schism between the two sides of America has been so appalling really. So I'm -- I am a little bit nervous about that, actually.

AMANPOUR: Well, New York will welcome you back with open arms, and we thank you very much for joining us.

LYALL: Thank you very much.

AMANPOUR: And after a break, Buckingham Palace behind me, as we've been talking about, is more than a royal residence. It's a beloved symbol of Britain's rich cultural heritage. But in some parts of the world, irreplaceable landmarks are increasingly being threatened and too often destroyed by extremists. We will imagine a world without these treasures when we come back after a break.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, here in London, there are monuments and memorable landmarks everywhere you turn. And UNESCO has designated some of them, like Westminster Abbey, where Prince William and his now expecting bride, were married two years ago. They've been designated as World Heritage sites.

So now imagine a world where 19 new sites, including an Italian volcano, have been added to the list. Mt. Etna in Sicily is among the most active volcanoes on Earth, and it's now also been designated an international treasury because of its, quote, "outstanding universal value."

But while natural wonders and architectural icons such as this ancient castle in Qatar have been honored and given protection, another site, the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali has been destroyed by Islamists, some with links to Al Qaeda.

Fortunately, UNESCO has recently vowed to help rebuild and safeguard Mali's cultural heritage. And with six sites in Syria now on the endangered list, including the ancient city of Damascus itself, the need for protecting the irreplaceable is more urgent than ever.

And that's it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com. Thanks for watching and goodbye from London.

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