Europe must desist from punishing Italy
It is unfair to make the Italians pay for the sins of their government, instead EU must seek to offer help
After the crisis of the past three months, Italy now has a government based on an uneasy coalition between the Five Star Movement and the League. The two parties will have difficulty agreeing a budget, but the budget they eventually propose is likely to exceed limits imposed on Italy as a member of the Eurozone. This would result in a renewed political crisis. The government may well fall, so we could be facing elections later this year or, more likely, early next year.
The outcome of the next Italian elections will greatly depend on how the European Union responds to the turmoil in that country. There is a strong inclination in Europe to use the occasion to teach Italy a lesson. If the EU follows this line, it will dig its own grave by provoking a negative response from the Italian electorate, which would then re-elect the Five Star Movement and the League with an increased majority.
Rather than try to teach Italy a lesson, the EU should ask itself: what can Europe learn from the upheaval in Italy? Historically, Italy has always been the strongest supporter of the EU because Italians didn’t trust their own governments. And with good reason: those governments had a tendency to be corrupt and to follow policies that didn’t serve the interests of the people. But the EU must not punish the Italian people for the sins of its governments.
What were the legitimate grievances that caused Italian voters to opt for Five Star and the League? First and foremost, it was Europe’s flawed migration policies that imposed an unfair burden on Italy. The EU does not have a common migration policy. Each member state has its own policy, which is often in conflict with the policies of other member states. But the EU does have the so-called Dublin III regulation, which applies to everyone. This regulation holds that refugees are the responsibility of the country where they first land. This situation has been not only unfair but also financially very burdensome at a time when Italy was lagging behind most other European countries economically. This was the main reason why the League, in particular, did so well in the recent elections.
What can Europe do, then, to influence the outcome of the next Italian elections in its favour? It must alter the Dublin III regulation and pay the lion’s share of the cost of integrating and supporting migrants in Italy. Forcibly relocating them elsewhere is neither possible nor desirable.
As a matter of fact, migrants impose a financial burden on the recipient country only until they are integrated. In the long run they make a much larger contribution to the recipient country than the cost of integrating them. I wonder how long inciting the public against migrants will remain a sure-fire way to win elections. By contrast, the EU would render Italy a great service by pursuing a Marshall Plan for Africa by utilising its largely unused borrowing capacity. Reforming the Dublin III regulation will be a long, drawn-out process. In order to constructively influence the next Italian elections, the EU must make a firm commitment at its June summit that it will compensate Italy even before the process has been completed. This will require Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel to take the lead and persuade the dissenting forces within the EU to follow.
The EU has many problems to deal with at the summit. But Italy has become the most pressing one, because it is threatening the very values on which the EU was founded. Right now, the future of the EU is too uncertain to launch the financing scheme, but if Germany and France undertook to pay the out-of-pocket expenses for the first year, which are bound to be minimal, it would go a long way to re-establishing confidence in the future of the EU. The amount invested would be small potatoes given what is at stake, namely the disintegration of the union.
The disintegration of Europe is no longer a figure of speech: it is a harsh reality. The EU faces a wide range of threats, external and internal. From the outside, the EU is menaced by Donald Trump’s US, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, and Bashar Al Assad’s Syria. Inside, Poland and Hungary are undermining the values on which the EU is based, but Italy is emerging as the most pressing challenge to its sustainability. The EU has little chance of avoiding disintegration unless the Franco-German alliance holds together. But that alliance is endangered by the elections for the European parliament in 2019, where they will be opposing each other in order to control the selection of the next president of the European Commission.
It is important to recognise problems in order to resolve them.