Stephen Pollard
day and about unemployment of 11.4 per cent. No wonder there is a revolt.
The Five Star Movement was founded seven years ago as a product of that anger: a populist revolt against Italian politics. It also opposes not just the euro but the EU itself.
Mr Grillo first entered Italian consciousness as a comedian. His rallies are titled “vaffa”: an Italian version of “f*** off”.
The Five Star Movement is very popular. It won the mayoral elections in Rome and Turin this year and in the latest polls is scoring about 30 per cent – a huge figure in Italy’s traditionally split political landscape. Mr Grillo’s appointment as leader of Italy would send shockwaves throughout Europe.
Italy has always been one of the EU’s stalwarts. It would send Brussels into a tailspin were it to be led by a man who would rather his country was outside the EU.
That tailspin could begin as early as Sunday night. Mr Renzi’s resignation and the likely appointment of Mr Grillo will almost certainly spark another eurozone crisis.
Mr Grillo has said he wants to pull Italy out of the euro and return to the lira. Sensible as that may be as a policy – the euro was crazy at its inception and is even more so today – it
AS THEY cast their vote so too will the Austrians in a re-run of the contest for the country’s presidency after the last vote was declared invalid. Both Austrian candidates are extremists. But while one is a Green, the other, Norbert Hofer, is from the far-Right Freedom Party. Most observers think Mr Hofer will win.
Like Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, the Freedom Party has undergone a makeover designed to dump its pro-Nazi origins. In reality the Freedom Party is no different to a made-over version of our BNP or National Front.
By Monday Austria could have a fascist president (again, one is tempted to write, after its experience with Kurt Waldheim) and Italy a government which rejects almost everything that has been the Italian mainstream in recent decades.
In Germany a poll this week found that 42 per cent of voters want a referendum on EU membership and two thirds think the EU “is heading in the wrong direction”. And of course in France Marine Le Pen seems certain to be in the final run-off for the presidency next year – and may well win.
So three of the core nations on which the EU has been built – Germany, France and Italy – could all soon have radically different stances.
The political establishment here has carried on the battle against Brexit by maintaining that the referendum vote was some sort of irrational aberration. It was nothing of the sort: it was a vote by ordinary voters who were fed up with being told they had no choice but to go along with the EU elite.
Now across Europe millions of voters are saying they’ve had enough.
‘People are turning against Brussels’