Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2012

A spectre is haunting the EU elite: the spectre of democracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, France, Greece, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Bruno Waterfield on the worries of the movers and shakers in the fancy office suites in Brussels:

The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe.

For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks — voting in elections this April — decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF? Imagine — and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats — if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone’s handling of the economic crisis.

A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the ‘fiscal compacts’, ‘debt brakes’ and ‘golden rules’ aimed at securing the EU’s reign in de facto perpetuity.

[. . .]

Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist campaign manager, has further horrified the EU by hinting that a new French president could hold a referendum — a taboo in contemporary European politics. ‘I am convinced that we will find allies for a renegotiation aimed at a policy change to pull us out of this austerity spiral and recession. We don’t like the idea of a popular vote because we are pro-Europeans and we don’t want a “No”, but nor can we allow tensions to spill over’, he said last week.

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