“What Does The Italian Elite Want?”
Bekanntlich habe ich vor mehr als einem Jahr die Logik eines Austritts von Italien aus dem Euro dargelegt. Hier eine sehr amüsante – dafür nicht weniger akkurate – Beschreibung der Lage:
- “(…) the December 4th referendum called by Matteo Renzi to seek approval for constitutional reforms could be such an Italian election that matters.”
- “Now, anyone well versed in Marxist thinking (i.e. anyone who went through the French education system) knows that a country’s political structure reflects the underlying economic super-structure. In short, a country’s political elite will put in place the rules that favor a country’s economic elite.”
- “(…) historically, the way the Italian nation held together was that northern Italy paid for southern Italy in constantly devaluing Liras. But as this option was taken off the table, things started to get complicated for Italian growth, Italian banks and Italian political unity (one can trace the rise of the Northern League more or less to the euro’s introduction).”
- “In Spain, the elite is divided between an old aristocracy, which owns half the country’s land and receives huge agriculture-linked subsidies from Brussels, and property developers who depend on low interest rates to stay in business. And just as turkeys seldom vote for Thanksgiving, these two constituencies will gladly condemn an entire Spanish generation to structural unemployment rather than stop feeding at the trough of low interest rates and agricultural subsidies dished out by Frankfurt and Brussels.”
- “In Germany, the elite is made up of the industrialists who live in the corridor between Munich and Hamburg, whose businesses have thrived due to other European countries being unable to devalue in order to keep up with the German productivity juggernaut. Such industrialists are unlikely to support a change to the status quo and risk a new deutschemark experiencing a parabolic rise in value.”
- “In France, the elite is made up of the bright minds who went to l’ENA and to Polytechnique, and who came up with the brilliant idea of the euro (to harpoon and control German economic might for the greater glory of France). This elite is so deeply invested in the European construction exercise that backing off is almost unthinkable.”
- “In Italy, meanwhile, the elite is the same as Germany’s, namely, the industrialists living in the Northern third of the country. But this elite, instead of benefiting from the euro, finds itself forced to fire its workforce, thereby undermining the very towns and villages they inhabit. This is why Italy is one of the few eurozone countries where one finds genuine Euro-sceptics among ‚polite society‘.”
- “With this in mind, opinion polls which point to a ‚No‘ victory in the December 4 referendum should probably be taken seriously. Which brings us to perhaps the most important question today, namely at what point do the European electorates’ repeated rejections of the Brussels behemoth start to matter?“
bto: Ich bleibe bei meiner Einschätzung, dass Italien der Kandidat für ein politisches Ende des Euro ist.
