As you pointed out, most clearly, we, for example, in Italy, are having problems because we have achieved very good fiscal results, but will they really be sustainable in the longer term unless the dominator, GDP, increases through growth.
ZAKARIA: What do you think it says about Western democracies that when one of the most important democracies, like Italy, the richest countries in the world got into trouble, you almost had to suspend democracy to fix it.
They have gone to an unelected czar, you, who has been asked to please fix it and then the politicians can come back in and do their mischief in a few years. But I mean it's a -- because there is an issue -- the problems Italy faces, all Western democracies face.
Over the last 30 years, there has been a build-up of entitlements, of goods and services being provided to the public from the state with no sense of -- you know, the kind of fiscal balance and the result is all these countries are in debt and the picture looks worse as people retire.
Can democracy handle this?
MONTI: Democracies have to handle this. How? Well, I believe the reason why democracies are very poor these days to handle this is that democracies, like markets, have become much too short-termist.
The combination of very important media of frequent elections, of even social networks, which tend to polarize people towards more extreme positions.
The combination of these factors has the consequence that, in democracies, politicians -- professional politicians tend to reject or only to embark into solutions that imply short-term costs and longer term benefits with great reluctancy only when they are faced with an actual huge crisis.
So the problem, to me, is how it's possible to reconcile classical electoral democracy, which, after all, we love, with a longer term perspective.
So I think democracy, in the long-term, in our countries will survive if it comes to be associated with leadership, will not survive if democracy plus media brings to us more and more followship rather than leadership.
