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 credit rating agency’s diagnosis of Italy’s problems, the FT reports. Rome would push the German government to realise it was in “its own enlightened self-interest” to lend more of its fiscal weight to lowering borrowing costs of Italy and other highly indebted governments. The stance could put Mr Monti, whose appointment to replace Silvio Berlusconi was cheered by German chancellor Angela Merkel, on a collision course with Berlin. Ms Merkel has been reluctant to take more aggressive action to lower Italy’s euro-era high borrowing costs, such as supporting commonly-backed “eurobonds” or increasing the size of the eurozone’s rescue funds.
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