There may come a time not too much further down the road when Brexit will have been not quite forgotten but placed into a second tier of European disintegration. In that top level, if it should continue, would reside all on its own Itexit. The Italians not the Britons will goad the question of the euro, and therefore the whole of the European experiment.
By now, the formula is a familiar one. If you are against tighter integration and European Union, then you are a fascist xenophobe, a racist of the first order. Rather than dissuade voters, this has, it appears, worked against those using the slurs who fervently hope to keep the experiment for much longer.
Complete vote tallies are not yet available, but by all accounts the Italians in heavy turnout voted heavily yesterday for anti-establishment, anti-euro parties. Though the Italian parliament could be in for a mess in the near future, euroskepticism and anti-establishment fever dominated to a much greater degree than anticipated (for yet another election). Even the mainstream commentary written ostensibly to describe what’s going on can’t refrain from locking out reality:
After establishment parties managed to contain populists in German, French and Dutch elections over the past twelve months, their defenses were overwhelmed in Italy as voters rebelled against two decades of lackluster economic growth and a surge in immigration. The upshot is a far more unpredictable partner for European leaders such as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron as they face the U.S. threat of a trade war while trying to reform the bloc.
This Bloomberg article (predictably) distills Italian economic angst as “two decades of lackluster economic growth” for the transparent purposes of delegitimizing voter dissatisfaction. A more honest paragraph would have been, “It’s been bad for twenty years, why are they now rebelling? Immigrants.” It wouldn’t have been any more true, just stripped of its obvious bias and the misanthropic intentions behind it.
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