WHY THE EU MIGHT NOT LAST BEYOND NEXT YEAR

CoMING so soon after the Brexit referendum result and the victory of Donald Trump, the aftermath of the Italian referendum had an oddly familiar feel. When I awoke to Radio 4 yesterday morning, there were the same voices of doom, the same tones of shock and grief, the same reports of tremors rippling through Europe’s financial markets.

once again Europe’s governing elites are struggling to come to terms with a political and financial earthquake.

The irony is that earlier on Sunday evening, the European elite had been breathing a sigh of relief. In the Austrian presidential election, the pro-European candidate had beaten his far-Right rival.

one senior figure in the winning Austrian Green Party even proclaimed a ‘global turning of the tide’ against the ‘hysterical’ forces of anti-EU populism.

But a few hours later came the news from Italy. And then nobody cared what the Austrian Greens thought.

In recent days, some polls had predicted Italy’s technocratic Prime Minister, the smoothly handsome Matteo Renzi, would lose his great gamble of calling a referendum on constitutional reform.

But nobody had anticipated the scale of his defeat, sending the euro plunging to its lowest level in nearly two years and raising serious doubts about the survival of the Italian financial system.

The Austrian election was not a turning of the tide at all. At the end of a year of stunning political shocks, it was merely history’s little joke, a trick to lull Brussels into a false sense of security before the roof fell in.

Mr Renzi’s referendum, a complicated constitutional reform package to amend the powers of the Senate, might seem bafflingly arcane. But to British eyes, the details of the Italian crisis seem reminiscent of what happened here on June 23.

In Italy, as in Britain, a centrist Prime Minister called a controversial referendum and ran a complacent campaign, only to become the victim of a grass-roots rebellion. And as in Britain, the political establishment seemed incapable of understanding millions of people whose patience with the status quo had simply run out.

FoR in the febrile atmosphere of European politics after Brexit, the Italian referendum was in effect, a colossal political showdown. In one corner were the centreLeft political elite, personified by Mr Renzi, in the other corner were the forces of antiEstablishment populism, incarnated by the anti-immigration Northern League and comedian Beppe Grillo’s rabblerousing Five Star Movement.

Mr Renzi’s humiliation was a devastating blow to the Continent’s political and financial classes. Not only did his Yes campaign lose by almost 20 per cent, but outside rich Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, he was simply humiliated.

In Italy’s southern regions, the margin was as much as two to one. And in Sicily and Sardinia Mr Renzi won barely a quarter of the vote.

The central issue, as so often these days, was Europe. Mr Renzi is a keen European, yet in Italy, as in Britain, resent- ment of the EU has been growing for years. Unemployment in Italy is almost 12 per cent, but youth unemployment stands at a staggering 38 per cent.

The Italian economy is far from perfect, but many young Italians blame Brussels and Berlin for imposing austerity policies that have made growth effectively impossible.

Exit polls suggest that voters under 35 rejected Mr Renzi’s reforms — and by implication, the German-dominated Eurozone project — by a stunning 81 per cent-19 per cent margin.

But there was more to this than austerity. Many Italians are furious at their government’s failure to control immigration from the Middle East and, in particular, North Africa.

In the past ten years, Italy’s immigrant population has doubled from less than 2.5 million to more than 5 million, in a country where almost 3 million people are out of work.

Hence the appeal of parties like the Northern League, which began as a regionalist party campaigning against Rome, but has eagerly embraced an anti-Brussels and anti-immigration agenda.

Even in the short term, the Italian crisis is a genuine threat to the survival of the Eurozone. Italy’s banks are in a terribly fragile condition.

Some experts think an Italian exit from the Eurozone, which would allow them to devalue their currency and reintroduce the lira, may only be a matter of time. Yet, almost incredibly, there is an even bigger issue.

There was a clue in the Northern League leader Matteo Salvini’s triumphant tweet on Sunday night: ‘Long live Trump, long live Putin, long live le Pen and long live the League!’ Mr Salvini sees himself as part of a global populist backlash against the liberal elite personified by career politicians like David Cameron (resigned), Renzi ( resigned), Francois Hollande ( resigning) and Hillary Clinton (defeated).

And potentially the most significant anti-liberal face is Marine le Pen. Next April she will contest the French presidential election on behalf of the far-Right Front National.

AS A fierce critic of the EU, she tweeted her delight at the Italian result: ‘ The Italians have disavowed the EU and Renzi.’. I think there is every chance that where Italy has led, France will follow. And if Mme le Pen does win, then I suspect the EU itself, at least in its current form, might not see the end of 2017.

The great mystery of all this to me is that the EU elite have had warning after warning.

They have known for years the euro was a calamitous mistake, that austerity was destroying the prospects of an entire generation from Athens to Alicante, that mass immigration was enormously unpopular. And they have known voters were outraged by their bungling of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.

Even now, it is not too late to change tack — but on they go, charging towards disaster.

And when, at last, they find themselves contemplating the blackened ruins of their European project, they should not blame the voters.

The only people they should blame are themselves.