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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Southern Europe. To the north, Italy borders France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia, and is approximately delimited by the Alpine watershed, enclosing the Po Valley and the Venetian Plain. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula and the two biggest Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Italy is considered to be both a major regional power and a leading middle power with membership in prominent institutions such as the UN, the EU, the NATO, the OECD, the WTO, the Uniting for Consensus, the G6, G7, G8, G10, G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Council of Europe and the Central European Initiative. Italy currently maintains the world's tenth-largest nominal defense budget and is a participant in the NATO nuclear sharing policy. Domestic demand is expected to gain momentum during 2014 as investments will turn round. The situation in Italy is such that almost 49% of people say they trust their political institutions, which is surprising to be as less than the OECD average of 56% as predicted by OECD and in the latest elections for which data is available, voter turnout in Italy was a whopping 81% of those registered.Ìý