Last Sunday’s votes have provided lessons for Europeans. Some are, at first sight, positive – or at any rate very encouraging. A small majority of Austrians – or at least a majority as big as the one that imposed Brexit on the United Kingdom – bore out what Bertolt Brecht said: the rise of Arturo Ui is not irresistible, not even in the country where Adolf Hitler was born (see EUROPE 11682). And given that the German dramatist set his play in the Chicago of Al Capone and prohibition, it is tempting to also see in it, that the rise of Donald Trump could have been, should have been resisted. Anyway, let’s not hide our relief: in times like these which more than ever lead us to think that the playwright, who was born German but died an Austrian citizen was not wrong when he warned that “the belly is still fertile from which the foul beast sprang”, any “defeat for nationalism and backward and anti-European populism” is to be welcomed – even if this defeat is much less “heavy” than outgoing European Parliament President Martin Schulz would have us believe.
In Austria, a battle has been won, not the war that has to be fought in the European Union to address the democratic malaise that is spreading virtually everywhere. On the very same day, Italy showed that there was still much to be done. No doubt Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has to bear a large part of the responsibility for the defeat in the referendum that resulted in his resignation. It was he who made the mistake of turning the consultation of the people into a vote on him. As journalist Benoît Hopquin once aptly said that: “the ordinary person in the street is vindictive in spirit”. In these days, which have once again become a time of protest, to such an extent that it’s not difficult to detect a “thirst for blood, in France and elsewhere, the furious desire to see the heads of aristocrats hoisted high on spikes, the need for symbolic beheadings, to use a shortcut” (Le Monde, 6 December, p21). By unwisely putting his neck on the line, Renzi ended up losing his head – in this, following the examples of Juppé and Sarkozy whose ambitions were cut short by a primary and François Hollande who quite simply was guillotined by his record in office.
While he is in part to blame for his own undoing, is former Mayor of Florence Renzi not also to some extent the victim of the constraints that Europe has put on Italy and on all the other countries of the Union, in particular those of the eurozone? “Italy votes ‘no’ to say ‘basta’ to Europe” headlined La Tribune. Voting “no” to say “basta” to a certain kind of Europe is how it should, in fact, read as the article by Romaric Godin accuses the masters of the eurozone of having placed Italy in their power and of imposing structural reforms that are clearly not right for the country. In short, Italy – just like Greece – should be seen more as the victim of macro-economic policies which MEP Philippe Lamberts (Greens/EFA, Belgium) deems to be “completely useless”. The economic stagnation that is the result in Italy is, the journalist argues, the price of Germany’s selfishness. At any rate, as Professor Mario Telò says, if Italy doesn’t make the most of the “end of austerity” as decreed by the Commission – an approach openly challenged by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and his Dutch counterpart and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem (see EUROPE 11682) – and if the “friends of Italy” countries are unable to win solidarity for it on migration, the country’s partners will, indeed, have paved the way for “a landslide victory in 2018” for the populist party of Beppe Grillo and the extremist Northern League, cosying up to the “fascists of ‘Fratelli d’Italia’”. In short, raccording to the former president of the Institute of European Studies at Brussels Free University, the eurozone’s third largest economy will in all likelihood come to be governed by “extremist parties calling for the country to leave the eurozone, which would mean the end of the single currency (or retaining it for a small club of northern, triple A rated countries, which amounts to the same thing)”.
Yet again, the question has to be whether the unashamedly inter-governmental management of the eurozone and, more generally, the European Union is not about to consign the Europe that some have sought to build since the start of the 1950s to the footnotes of history. There will, of course, be European leaders who will point to the populism of Matteo Renzi, guilty of not wanting to join with Mrs Merkel and Mr Hollande in their chorus of “Don’t worry, be happy” on the castle ramparts in Bratislava after last September’s European summit. There will be others who will complain that the European flag was missing at some of the Italian leader’s press conferences. But will there be one who will humbly ask himself whether the way the Union is developing isn’t playing a part in it? Or who will ask whether the shackles imposed in the name of the law of the strongest are not becoming an unbearable straitjacket for those who, in some countries are having to deal with a rise of populist forces? No, there is no real reason for unbridled rejoicing at the victory of the Green Alexander Van der Bellen because 47% of Austrians who turned out to vote cast their ballot for the right-wing extremist, nationalist candidate. Failing to see that unfortunately proves right the (for the time being) UK MEP and leader of the Eurosceptical European Conservatives and Reformers Group Syed Kamall who has made the point that European leaders prefer to scold those who vote for nationalists rather than address their concerns. He’s correct: the public is increasingly fearful, increasingly angry throughout all of Europe. Populism, nationalism and all forms of extremism feed on this. It is time, to urgently pay attention to the fringes of the new civil society which, as in Austria, are rising to prevent the irreparable. (To be continued) (Original version in French by Michel Theys)