This is the question posed by the decision of Italian President Sergio Mattarella to agree to the new list of ministers presented to him by Prime Minister-designate Giuseppe Conte of the Eurosceptic Lega and Five Star Movement coalition, after the coalition’s original choice for finance minister, Paulo Salvona, was rejected, deepening a political crisis that has engulfed Italy since the March elections.
READ MORE: Lega Party Calls on Italian President to Elect New Parliament
Critics and Supporters
To its critics this Lega (League; formerly Northern League) and Five Star Movement coalition is yet another example of the alarming rise of right wing populism across Europe, redolent of the 1930s, the last time Europe witnessed this kind of support for far right parties — and in similar conditions of economic recession and dislocation — culminating in with the continent being pushed into the abyss of fascism.
This being said, supporters of Lega and the Five Star Movement have no truck with this depiction, dismissing it as fearmongering on the part of apologists for an EU establishment that has extended itself in serving the interests of a global financial and corporate elite at the expense of ordinary people for far too long. Thus the Lega-Five Star coalition arrives as a much-needed and anti-establishment corrective, restoring sovereignty and justice to a country suffering under the juggernaut of austerity.
Lega-Five Star Coalition Throws Political Hand Grenade Into Heart of EU
Regardless of how anyone chooses to depict this Eurosceptic Italian coalition, there is no arguing it has thrown a political hand grenade into the heart of the EU, which starting with the Greek crisis of 2015, then Brexit in 2016 — and along with the growing popularity of centrifugal forces all across the EU — is making business as usual in Brussels an increasingly impossible dream.
READ MORE: Italy's Lega Plans to Draft Law on Direct Presidential Election
Yet despite this reality lapping up against its door, Brussels continues to exist in a state of abject denial over the fact that the neoliberal economic model they hold so dear is not only broken it is dead, lifeless, rendered a corpse by the 2008 global financial crash and resulting austerity programs which have only succeeded in deepening the ensuing pain for millions — ordinary citizens who were not responsible for said crash but who have been forced to pay the price.
In other words, rather than take the necessary measures required to alleviate the pain and dislocation that has and continues to be wrought under an economic model which stands as a tyrant over society, Brussels prefers to continue to dig its own political grave by holding on to it for dear life.
Austerity Madness
US Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is in no doubt where the problem lies when it comes to the EU, writing in The New York Times: "Even though Brussels and Berlin were wrong again and again about the economics — even though the austerity they imposed was every bit as economically disastrous as critics warned — they continued to act as if they knew all the answers, that any suffering along the way was, in effect, necessary punishment for past sins."
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In Brussels it is ideology not common sense or justice driving events, leading directly to the rise of Euroscepticism as the new normal. How could it be otherwise when we have seen the punishment Krugman describes being doled out to the many who were not responsible for the collapse of neoliberalism with austerity, while the few who were responsible — i.e. major banks and financial institutions — have been rewarded with tax cuts and the continuation of gargantuan salaries and bonuses for their executives?
EU Increasingly Anti-Democratic
Such a state of affairs is not only unjust it is beyond unjust? Indeed it is a recipe for the kind of anger that fuelled Brexit and which has propelled hitherto marginal parties such as Front National in France and the Lega-Five Star coalition in Italy to prominence.
As for the outrageous intervention of EU Budget Commissioner, Gunther Oettinger of Germany, who in an interview with German television on the Italian crisis more or less declared that the Italian people were receiving their just desserts for daring to vote for populists, this is liberal hubris gone mad on the part of an EU bureaucracy that exists in a bubble, disconnected from reality.
The Unreality of Eurosceptic Voices
Here, though, we need to be careful. For just as EU officialdom is guilty of peddling a narrative rooted in unreality, so are many opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and the leadership of the Lega-Five Star coalition.
READ MORE: Cottarelli Refuses Italy's PM Post, While Lega, M5S Agree on Coalition Gov't
To be fair to Marine Le Pen and others of her ilk though, where Paul Krugman misses the point is in failing to understand — or at least understating — the extent to which opponents of the EU are not only opposed on economic grounds. There are cultural factors at play also, a sense of societies undergoing seismic and worrying upheaval as a consequence of free movement and immigration. There is nothing to be gained in avoiding this reality either — nothing whatsoever. Public support for parties with radical anti-immigrant positions and policies, such as Lega and Five Star in Italy, can no longer be ignored or dismissed.
Lack of Left Alternative to Status Quo
What has been absent, almost completely, from the debate on the future of Europe and the EU is one in support of viable left opposition to the EU in its current neoliberal form, akin to a private club for rich bankers, corporate execs and large institutional shareholders.
Here we are obliged to understand that neoliberalism is an economic system which not only sows grievous inequality within states but also between states; the latter being central to the upsurge in immigration that has taken place across the EU in recent years. Add to the mix the previously identified global economic recession, along with the refugee crisis emanating from North Africa and the Middle East, and you have yourself a perfect migration storm.
The point is that the only serious and viable way to control migration flow across the EU is by ending the ability of corporations to undercut pay and conditions, taking advantage of EU rules and regulations that are prejudiced in favour of their interests at the expense of ordinary working people.
READ MORE: MEP Blames EU, France, Germany for Pushing Italy Into Political Turmoil
Thus the harmonisation of pay and conditions across the EU is not only desirable at this point it is absolutely vital, as is controlling the overweening domination of the German economy within the eurozone. Bonn cannot continue to reap all the benefits when the economic weather is favourable, while bearing the least pain when the you-know-what hits the fan.
EU Must Reform or Die
As things stand the EU represents the worst of both worlds — i.e. monetary union without the necessary fiscal (political union) to make it tenable; and too much political union at the expense of economic sovereignty in periods of economic downturn and recession when the ability of its member states to borrow to invest is crucial.
Thus for the European Union it is now a case of reform or die. However with a non-negotiable plank of any such reform being an end to neoliberal austerity, and with neoliberal austerity a by-product of the union's ideological foundations, there seems more chance of dead journalists rising from the dead in Kiev than serious reform being undertaken in Brussels at present.
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