Mario Monti thought he had broken the curse famously summed up by Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister: "We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we have done it." Mr Monti pushed austerity and reform and, as European leaders applauded, opinion polls for a while suggested Italians trusted him. But when the professor tried to make the transition from appointed technocrat to elected leader, his centrist coalition barely scraped a tenth of the vote.
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