{"id":13458,"date":"2012-02-08T10:25:04","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T15:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13458"},"modified":"2018-01-11T16:10:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T21:10:21","slug":"a-spectre-is-haunting-the-eu-elite-the-spectre-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/08\/a-spectre-is-haunting-the-eu-elite-the-spectre-of-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"A spectre is haunting the EU elite: the spectre of democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/index.php\/site\/article\/12058\" target=\"_blank\">Bruno Waterfield<\/a> on the worries of the movers and shakers in the fancy office suites in Brussels:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The European Union is currently straining every sinew in a campaign to stifle outbreaks of politics across Europe.<\/p>\n<p>For the EU oligarchs, democracy sucks. What if the Greeks &mdash; voting in elections this April &mdash; decide to tear up an austerity programme painstakingly hammered out by their betters in the EU and the IMF? Imagine &mdash; and the memory of all those lost referendums still smarts among Eurocrats &mdash; if a country should decide it has had enough of the economic mismanagement and diktat that has characterised the Eurozone\u2019s handling of the economic crisis.<\/p>\n<p>A spectre is indeed haunting the corridors of Brussels offices and it is real: a well-founded fear that voters will reject the \u2018fiscal compacts\u2019, \u2018debt brakes\u2019 and \u2018golden rules\u2019 aimed at securing the EU\u2019s reign in <em>de facto<\/em> perpetuity.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Pierre Moscovici, the Socialist campaign manager, has further horrified the EU by hinting that a new French president could hold a referendum &mdash; a taboo in contemporary European politics. \u2018I 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\u2019t like the idea of a popular vote because we are pro-Europeans and we don\u2019t want a \u201cNo\u201d, but nor can we allow tensions to spill over\u2019, he said last week.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &mdash; voting in elections this April &mdash; decide to tear [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62,1117,1526,53],"tags":[766,188,337],"class_list":["post-13458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-france","category-greece","category-politics","tag-democracy","tag-electionwatch","tag-eu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3v4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13458"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13460,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13458\/revisions\/13460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}