Dear Reader, this Beacons was written before Mr Conte's appointment last night to the head of the Italian government. It follows on from the previous Beacons.
By virtue of remaining obstinately shut off in their national citadels, the democrats of Europe are losing ground and sliding headlong into their own downfall. The current distressing scenes playing out in Italy cannot be properly understood without taking into account the denial of European democracy that is their root cause.
Awareness of this should be the result of the denial of democracy on many levels currently to be seen in Rome. The fact that President Sergio Mattarella has managed to pull the rug out from under the government which the lawyer Giuseppe Conte was supposed to take the apparent leadership of, on the grounds that he could not accept the position of finance minister being held by a notorious Eurosceptic, is a major political act. He did it in the name of the vital need for his country to respect its European commitments: “in my role as guarantor (of the constitution), I could not accept a choice that could have led to Italy leaving the euro and to concerns on the part of Italian and foreign investors”, the head of state explained sombrely (our translation; see EUROPE 12028).
With the gap between the German and Italian interest rates widening since the announcement of the coalition between Liga and the M5S, this decision is entirely rational. Particularly as the governmental contract presented in recent days to President Mattarella made no (further) mention of the idea of Italy leaving the Eurozone. However...
However, this presidential decision can be considered a denial of democracy. It was naturally considered as such by the ousted coalition members. “Italy is not a free country, it is a country under the financial, not military, occupation of the Germans, the French and the bureaucrats of Brussels”, the head of the League, Matteo Salvini, immediately barked, before twisting the knife further in the democratic wound: “without a democracy, if we are still living under a democracy, there is only one thing to do: let the Italian people have their say”.
How can anyone disagree with this? His counterpart from the Movimiento 5 Stelle, Luigi Di Maio, was equally correct when he told his voters: “so, we can clearly say that there is no point in voting as it is the ratings agencies, financial and banking lobbies that run the governments”. The worst thing is that Salvini and Di Maio are not entirely wrong; in fact, they are more right than wrong. This, in any case, is what gives power to any and all political forces that see the European Union as the source of all national ills, such as the French National Front, which spoke out against a “coup d'État” led by “Brussels, the financial markets and Germany” (Le Monde, 28 May; our translation).
And yet these legitimately angry voices are wrong! They are wrong because they do not own the euro. Or at least, their country is not the sole owner of the euro, as the single currency is shared between nineteen different countries. Their democratic weight therefore equates to a simple one-nineteenth of the Eurozone, which should, in all logic, help them to understand that they can by no means decide on their own how the Eurozone should be economically run. Their democracy stops where that of the other partner countries starts. This is how it is under European integration that the governments are obstinately denying its own full and complete democratic dimension. This, right there, is the European denial of democracy!
In the intergovernmental Europe in which we live, democracy is being flouted by member states which adopt the policies of the European Council by means of compromises carved out against the backdrop of the obvious fact that the law of the jungle is still the greatest of all laws. These compromises suit some countries far better than others, but they also inevitably lead to disappointment or even defiance and anger among the citizens, more and more of whom are suffering from an economic situation that is getting worse when the European construction – and the Eurozone in particular – was supposed to guarantee their prosperity.
These policies are a major denial of democracy. In any democracy worthy of the name, major budgetary and economic choices are made by governments and duly enshrined, following public parliamentary debates, by a majority of members of Parliament appointed by the citizens. In the EU, which so loves to lecture on democracy and good governance throughout the whole world, the citizens are gagged. When you consider this, the fact that more and more citizens have got to the point at which they are rebelling by voting for populist, nationalist and extremist parties of all stripes, even racist and xenophobic ones, starts to look entirely logical. Even, in fact, healthy, as the eminent democrats who run the EU from their castles and keeps at home are only pretending to hear them, as they have no intention of even listening to them.
The Italian crisis is writing the death certificate of intergovernmental Europe. We can only hope that the European project will not share its grave...
Michel Theys