What were the Italians thinking? Didn’t they realize that the election of Euroskeptics would just result in the powers-that-be sending them back to vote (and possibly to vote again) until they get the right answer? Brendan O’Neill calls it a putsch:
There has been a putsch in Italy. A bloodless putsch, with no guns or jackboots, but a putsch nonetheless. The president’s vetoing of the finance minister put forward by the populist parties that won a huge number of votes in the General Election in March represents a grave assault on the democratic will. It is a technocratic coup, an EU-influenced, big-business-pleasing attempt to isolate and weaken the popular anti-Brussels sentiment that has swept Italy. Indeed, it has brought about the collapse of the talks to form a new populist government and made it necessary to hold fresh elections. Let’s be honest about what has happened here: March’s democratic election has essentially been voided by technocrats who care more about Euro financiers than they do about the ordinary people of Italy.
Italy has been plunged into political crisis by establishment figures who are repulsed by the Euroscepticism spreading through the nation. In the election in March, the mainstream parties – the Democratic Party and Forza Italia – were decimated by voters. They suffered an historic blow at the ballot box, the Democratic Party getting 18.7 per cent of the vote, and Forza Italia an even sadder 14 per cent. Meanwhile, populist parties, in particular the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (formerly the Northern League), soared to the forefront of political life. M5S won 32.7 per cent of the vote, and the League won 17.4 per cent – a huge rise on the four per cent it got in the election in 2013.
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The usurping of the popular will is best summed up in who has been promoted by Mattarella to replace Conte as the interim prime minister: Carlo Cottarelli, a former senior official in the International Monetary Fund who is referred to as ‘Mr Scissors’ for his insistence on cuts to public spending. So even though millions of Italians voted for populist parties that said they would reverse spending cuts and challenge Eurozone stability rules, now they find themselves ruled, for the time being, by a technocrat who takes an entirely different view. They have ended up with the opposite to what they voted for. This is the putsch; this is the technocratic coup; this is the thwarting of the democratic outlook by an establishment that thinks it knows better than ordinary people how their lives should be run.
This is how life in the Eurozone, and in the EU more broadly, works now. The people and the parties they vote for are written off by the expert class and technocrats and the forces of big business as irrational or prejudiced or dangerous, and the popular will is overriden in the name of maintaining the status quo. We saw this in the EU fury that greeted the French, Dutch and Irish revolts against the EU Constitution a decade ago; in the enforcement of spending cuts in Greece and Ireland that the people in those countries did not want; and we see it in the ongoing efforts by Brussels and its useful idiots in Britain to weaken or even kill off our mass vote for Brexit. Remainers, behold the truth of the institution you are fighting to defend: not the happy-clappy union of European peoples of your deluded dreams, but rather a vast oligarchical machine that laughs in the face of national sovereignty, views the democratic will as a pesky fly to be swatted away, and looks upon ordinary people as too pig-ignorant to make big political decisions. We need more rebellions against this elitist Euro-hatred for the views of ordinary people, and an all-out defence of the hard-won European principle of democracy.
