Fear in Brussels as Italian anti-EU leaders sworn in
ITALY yesterday ushered in an openly Eurosceptic government led by political novices from the far-Left and far-Right – prompting panic in Brussels.
The anti-establishment coalition’s arrival in power brought temporary relief to the markets after weeks of uncertainty, but is set to open up clashes with EU chiefs.
It follows an election in March that saw Italy’s older parties knocked back by emerging political forces.
Brussels is nervous about the ruling partnership between the Five- Star Movement and the far-Right League party – despite the coalition rowing back from its previous calls to boycott the euro.
The parties plan to take aim at EU spending rules by promising to slash taxes and increase social welfare payments, alongside a pledge to deport thousands of illegal immigrants. Giuseppe Conte, who has no political experience, was yesterday sworn in as prime minister at Rome’s Quirinale Palace.
The law professor said the coalition, made up of 18 ministers from across the political spectrum, would be a ‘government of change’. The 53-year-old previously served as legal adviser to the Five Star Movement’s leadership and has advocated a shake-up of the country’s political establishment.
Mr Conte was rushed from a lecture he was giving at the University of Florence on Thursday to prepare for yesterday’s ceremony, where he said: ‘You have to trust all of us.’
The new government, sworn in yesterday, will be propped up by Five-Star chief Luigi Di Maio and League’s leader Matteo Salvini.
Mr Salvini, now interior minister, promised the government would adopt a ‘ send them home’ approach to the estimated 500,000 migrants in Italy.
He said: ‘Open doors in Italy for good people and a one-way ticket for those who come to Italy to create commotion and think they will be taken care of – “send them home” will be one of our top priorities. I want to make Italy a protagonist in Europe again.
‘With good manners, without causing confusion, but I’m fed up of governments with cap in hand. We are second to none.’
He said the hard-line approach was necessary to address the burden placed on Italy during the EU migration crisis. Mr Di Maio will take over a new industry and labour ministry, seeking to expand benefits for struggling families and workers.
The coalition leaders agreed to remove devout Eurosceptic Paolo Savona as finance minister over concerns about his calls to take Italy out of the euro.
But they handed the 81-year-old a new position as Europe minister in a move likely to further stoke tensions with Brussels. They offset the decision by choosing Enzo Moavero Milanesi, an EU-backing academic who served in a 2011 government that implemented EU austerity measures, as foreign minister.
The government was greeted with a warning from Donald Tusk last night, who said the EU needed ‘unity and solidarity more than ever’. ‘Your appointment comes at a crucial time for Italy and the entire European Union,’ the European Council president wrote in a letter of congratulations.
Of course they were much too Machiavellian to admit it at the time. But when the architects of what is now the european union set out their vision, they wanted a superstate that smashed down national borders, which removed countries’ own sovereignty and which rode roughshod over democracy.
Indeed, these founding fathers explicitly wrote the objective of ‘ever closer union’ among the peoples of europe into the 1957 Treaty of rome.
Aware of the huge threat this posed, far- sighted British political leaders at the time, such as Labour’s clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell, warned that national independence was incompatible with what was then called the european economic community.
Another man to realise that if Britain joined, this country would no longer be master of its own destiny and would lose the power to make its laws and control its own borders was the great historian AJP Taylor.
As the author of books such as The origins of The second World War, he could legitimately claim to have more knowledge than anyone else about european history and of Britain’s relationship with the continent, and thus he warned as strongly as he could against the uK’s membership.
Taylor, whose brilliant TV lectures are currently being re- shown on the BBc Parliament channel, stated that the ultimate aim was political union run by an arrogant elite who he called, with heavy irony, ‘top people’.
Above all, he said that Britain had been ‘most secure when we kept out of europe’, adding that ‘ meddling with european affairs has brought us nothing but toil and suffering.’ Predictably, our defeatist political establishment failed to heed his wise words.
NOT long after, in 1972, edward Heath, the conservative Prime Minister, set about negotiating Britain’s membership of the common Market.
To win voters to his cause, he cynically misled the British people — telling them that this was only a free trade deal and we would not be giving away our national sovereignty.
He shamefully ignored the fact that it is in the DNA of the Brussels elite to destroy democracy of the kind that Britain has enjoyed for centuries and which it has spread across the world.
More important to these unelected panjandrums was the desire to yoke france and Germany together in a union so as to prevent a third world war after two terrible conflicts that desolated the european continent in the last century. Admittedly, that was a noble cause but it meant the ruthless creation of a european superstate.
It is no wonder that other countries rebelled against this challenge to their own sovereignty and sense of nationhood.
At the ballot box, the Danes (in 1992) rejected an extension of Brussels’ powers in the Maastricht Treaty, and the Irish followed suit in a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty in 2008.
Likewise, when crisis-hit Greece tried to assert its independence from the eu’s economic policy five years ago, the bully-boys at the european central Bank and in Brussels, backed by German bankers, mercilessly put a stop to the Greek mutiny. The consequences for Greek democracy — and the country’s economy — have been devastating.
The latest manifestation of this battle of wills between an authoritarian Brussels and individual nations trying to uphold democracy came this week with a set of extraordinary events in Italy. After national elections in March, Italian voters committed themselves to what to the eu elite is the ultimate heresy. They voted in their millions for politicians who said they were prepared to abandon the european single currency.
The result was that two populist parties, the League and the five star Movement, came together to try to form a government.
There is little surprise that the Italian people are increasingly fed up with eu membership. Italy has struggled since adopting the euro currency 18 years ago.
Deprived of the ability to manage its own economy, there has been
cumulative economic growth since then.
In recent years, Brussels has imposed unelected technocrats to run the rome government with savagely austere economic policies. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs.
seemingly blind to this human suffering and to this upsurge in democratic sentiment, Brussels officials vented their spleen against the Italian people.
Most outrageously, european commissioner Guenther oettinger said the crisis would teach Italians not to vote for ‘populist’ parties next time.
WITHOUT a shred of evidence and in a manner akin to those behind Project fear in the run-up to the eu referendum in the uK, he said menacingly that the financial markets would punish Italy and that votes for anti-eu candidates risked destroying the Italian economy.
In other words, if Italians did not vote the ‘right’ way the next time they go to the polls, they will be punished.
This from a man whose main claim to fame is having been the leader of the christian Democratic union in the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
What we are witnessing, I fear, is a looming tragedy. If Italy stays within the eu’s economic straitjacket, it faces more years tied to a broken system which has given it two decades of economic stagnation with one out of every three youths jobless.
Alternatively, if the Italians have the courage to back politicians who will pull their country out of the euro, I believe their economy will recover.
Italy is not alone in defending democracy against the Brussels despots.
In eastern european countries, voters are in revolt against the eu on the issue of open borders and consequent mass immigration.
In spain, too, the malign antidemocratic influence of Brussels is being felt.
LAST year, during catalonia’s independence vote, as the Madrid government panicked, state troopers were sent in and beat up pensioners, plastic bullets were fired at crowds and ballot boxes were torn from polling stations
And what was Brussels’ response to this brazen assault on the most fundamental human right of people to vote?
The european commission said the spanish government’s ‘ proportionate use of force’ was necessary to uphold the rule of law.
What about the principle of democracy?
It seems that to Brussels, democracy is a dirty word.
for these unelected and unaccountable nabobs, democracy can be replaced with rule by bankers, bureaucrats and technocrats.
All this is an awful paradox, which I identified in this column last week.
The european union was set up to promote peace and harmony across a continent that had been ravaged by two wars in which around 70 million people died.
But in a dark irony, it is now creating precisely the opposite result.
It is no exaggeration to say that europe is riven by more hatreds, divisions and conflicts than at any time since 1945 — and they are threatening to tear the continent apart.
How tragic if the vision of the eu’s founders, who wanted to prevent another terrible war, were responsible for the collapse of parliamentary democracy.
And we all know what happened the last time that occurred, in the 1930s: voters turned to paramilitary bullies and nationalist dictators.