The leader of the new Italian government is not a coy, clandestine or even discreet rightist, but an offensive right-wing politician. For them, Germany is not a friend, but only a purser and guarantor.
The Italian friend went seven miles further from Europe tonight. Giorgia Meloni and her party Fratelli d’Italia will lead the government in the future.
According to the forecast this morning, around 44 percent of the votes cast and more than 50 percent of the parliamentary seats will go to a party alliance whose fixed stars in the political firmament are not Kohl, Gorbachev and Obama, but Le Pen, Orbán and Trump.
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What they have in common is that they see the European idea as the enemy of the nation, immigration as a declaration of war on their own identity, and Germany as a big ATM that keeps them happy with grants and credit authorizations from Brussels and fresh money from Frankfurt. The rest is tinsel.
The leader of the new Italian government is not a coy, clandestine or even discreet rightist, but an offensive right-wing politician. She was already a minister under Berlusconi, who finally seemed to her to be too moderate.
She founded her own political formation, the Italian Brothers, because she couldn’t bear the thought of “going down in history as the generation that murdered the right wing”. She wants to make the right “stronger than ever” and “give the Italian nation a patriotic government again”.
As early as 1996, at the age of 19, she expressed her affection for the “Duce”, Hitler’s friend and dictator Benito Mussolini, in an interview with the French public television station INA:
“Mussolini was a good politician because whatever he did, he did for Italy.”
She often ended her campaign speeches with the following programmatic sentences:
“Yes to the natural family – no to the LGBT lobby.
Yes to the culture of life, no to abortions.
Yes to Christian principles, no to Islamist violence.
Yes to our fellow citizens, no to the international financial world.
Yes to the independence of the peoples, no to the bureaucrats in Brussels.”
In the minds of these Italian politicians, Germany appears as a purser and guarantor, but not as a friend. Meloni speaks of a “certain aversion to Germany”. At an election campaign event in Milan, she recently blamed the Netherlands as well as Germany for the failure of the negotiations on an EU-wide gas price cap. Germany is against it because “it is the richest and can therefore afford higher prices than the others and can secure a right of first refusal”.
At the same time, Italy – and that is the really dramatic finding of this election – has said goodbye to the serious claim of Mario Draghi, who as prime minister failed to drive out his country’s addiction to credit and political corruption. Before the Senate, he recently denied his own people the ability to reform:
“Calls for more borrowing grew louder just when the need to look at debt sustainability was greatest. The desire to move forward together gradually faded.”
So our Italian friend stands in front of us, clearly taken aback. The addiction to credit has eaten him up, nationalism has confused him politically, the mafia – with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Ndrangheta clan in Calabria – does not stop forming metastases that first rob the state apparatus of its functionality and meanwhile also its dignity.
This republic of godfathers cannot serve its citizens striving for an increase in prosperity. Here is the damage balance:
In Germany, all warning lights must be on the day after this election. The wish of the debtor countries France, Italy and Co. for a jointly guaranteed Eurobond, which should restore their damaged creditworthiness on the global financial markets, must be resisted. “Italy’s debts will not be reduced by mutualizing them,” says Ifo President Clemens Fuest. Jens Weidmann, former President of the Bundesbank, adds:
“You don’t trust someone else with your credit card if you don’t have a way of controlling their spending. “
Gabor Steingart is one of the best-known journalists in the country. He publishes the newsletter The Pioneer Briefing. The podcast of the same name is Germany’s leading daily podcast for politics and business. Since May 2020, Steingart has been working with his editorial staff on the ship “The Pioneer One”. Before founding Media Pioneer, Steingart was, among other things, Chairman of the Management Board of the Handelsblatt Media Group. You can subscribe to his free newsletter here.
Conclusion: Italy cannot be congratulated the morning after, only pitied. In this situation, Eurobonds are not the locomotive of European unification, but rather its derailment. Italian voters didn’t choose to leave Europe on Sunday, but they did press the pause button on further integration.
