Matteo Renzi Select Cabinet; To Be Sworn In On Saturday As The New Prime Minister Of Italy

Italy’s Matteo Renzi is all set to be the youngest prime minister for the country at the age of 39 and formally accepted the mandate on Friday along with selecting his cabinet. He will be sworn in on Saturday to the post.

After ousting the earlier Prime Minister Enrico Letta last month in a vote, President Giorgio Napolitano is said to have asked Renzi to form the government rather than dissolving the legislature and calling for early elections. Renzi gave a formal nod to the offer and announced his 16-member cabinet with the finance ministry to Pier Carlo Padoan, a chief economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"It's a government that will start to work from tomorrow morning," Renzi said announcing his team on Friday, according to BBC. The new government will have to get a vote of confidence expected to be held on Monday, before it can officially start work.

Renzi was earlier the mayor of Florence and is coming to power without holding a nationally elected office. After the fall of Letta’s government, who had been accused of failing to bring in reforms to a supposedly corrupt and wasteful bureaucracy, Napolitano gave Renzi the task of seeking to preserve the legislature through 2018 till it finishes assembling a majority.

Italy has been struggling with a staggering unemployment rate of 12.7 percent, the highest in the last 40 years, despite being Europe’s third-largest economy. The country’s economy has seen a reduction of 9 percent over the last seven years, along with a persistent decline in personal income and standard of living.

“Despite uncertainties, we expect Renzi’s newly formed government to survive the confidence vote at the Senate,” Alessandro Tentori, an analyst with Citigroup, said in a research report according to Bloomberg. “We see this as a positive market development for Italy.”