The sphinx who reshaped Europe
Mario Draghi, the technocrat who sidelined politicians and saved the Euro, now needs them to succeed as Italy’s PM
By Ben Judah
If there
was one soundbite, in Europe, in the last decade on which history turned, this
was it. After a confusing preamble about a bumblebee that shouldn’t be able to
fly, Draghi stopped reading from his script and, for 16 seconds, looked into
the camera. “Within our mandate, within our mandate … the ECB is ready to do
whatever it takes to preserve the Euro.” He paused, adding, just to make sure:
“Believe me, it will be enough.” Within minutes, the news hit the wires;
billions shorting the Euro began to move in the opposite direction.
Mario
Draghi is now Italian prime minister. The man who “saved the Euro” has been
summoned from retirement to “save Italy” from the pandemic. There is a Europe
of the mind: of Beethoven, summer holidays and the smell of coffee. Then there
is Europe as it actually functions today — the Europe of Mario Draghi. A
creature of the EU, understand him and you understand how to make friends in
Brussels; how to win the most important battles; and how to be, among 27
countries, really European. But, above all, understand Draghi and you
understand how power works in the EU. He has built a technocratic Europe and
risen to its heights.
Draghi was
made in Rome. Not the city of old men it is today but the Rome of Fellini, Red
Brigade attacks and the Italian miracle: an emerging market in Europe, running
hot with labour unrest, a communist surge and the joy of youth. But whilst his
generation was wild, flirting with extremism and dreaming of new worlds on
campus, Draghi was tame and burdened by responsibility. An outsider in May ’68.
It was his schooldays, not his university, that
those who know him best say made him who he is
“My hair
was quite long,” he told Die Zeit, “but not very long. And, that aside, I did
not have parents against whom I might have rebelled.” His father, the well
connected, geriatric banker, Carlo Draghi, born in 1895, had died when he was
15. His mother went into swift decline soon after. At 16, he returned from
holiday to find a pile of unpaid bills waiting for him. Draghi was an orphan at
19.
Friends
remember how a poised exterior concealed real angst. Maurizio Franzini, an
economist, once shared an office with him; “He said, ‘I don’t look anxious. But
I’m really anxious’.” When it came to university, haunted by discussions with
his father and one of his earliest memories, a train ride with the governor of
the Bank of Italy, Draghi chose economics at La Sapienza in Rome. But it was
his schooldays, not his university, that those who know him best say made him
who he is.
“He was
well trained by the Jesuits,” said Vincenzo Visco, who worked hand in glove
with him as Italian finance and then treasury minister. “They taught him to be
prudent, reserved and to listen. He’s a social Catholic.” Mentioning the
Jesuits has multiple meanings for Italians. It is a class marker that
inexorably ties him to Massimiliano Massimo, the Jesuits’ Roman Eton, where
Draghi studied with the sons of ministers and tycoons. It is the sign of a
severe, rigorous education at the hands of scholar-priests; and it is
privilege. For Europeans, it is often a way to draw attention to his manner:
pedagogic; precise, shadowy and, if necessary, ruthless.
Herman Van
Rompuy, the haiku-writing former President of the European Council, found it
amusing. More than once, on the worst nights of the Euro crisis, surveying a
table of Mario Monti and Mariano Rajoy, then Italian and Spanish premiers,
sitting by Draghi, the former Belgian premier would joke, “We are good Jesuit
students here, trying to find a compromise.”
Draghi had counselled the prime minister to
proceed with a currency union, something he previously described as “madness”
But like
any good joke, it hinted at something serious: that these men who emerged from
a secretive fraternity founded to save the church were now serving Europe.
“Maybe you don’t know,” said Mario Tiberi, an old colleague from academia,
“that the Jesuits have a mantra from their founding Saint Ignatius of Loyola
about serving the vision of God: todo modo, which in English means ‘whatever it
takes’.”
As a wave of political killings followed ’68, Draghi learned the first lesson of political life. Always find the right mentor. His name was Federico Caffè. Amidst the clamour he lived, his students said, “like a monk”. Caffè was influential: Italy’s great Keynesian economist. Convinced Draghi was brilliant, he introduced him to Franco Modigliani, the Italian economist at MIT, who accepted him as a student. But he still had to complete his thesis. “It was on the single currency and I concluded that the single currency was madness, something absolutely not to do,” said Draghi, at an event honouring his mentor.
Those who
would shape the economic discourse of the age taught Draghi at MIT. He proudly
points out that five of his professors won Nobel Prizes — Paul Samuelson, Bob
Solow, Franco Modigliani, Peter Diamond, and Robert Engle. His peers — Ben
Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Kenneth Rogoff, Olivier Blanchard — would become high
priests of the Federal Reserve, New York Times, austerity and the IMF
respectively. As the new world of floating exchange rates, free flowing capital
and empowered central bankers was starting to emerge, a circle of economists
was coalescing. Together they shaped the neoliberal age.
Draghi was
not looking for dogma. Unlike his mentors, Draghi’s economics has never set
into a theory but has kept moving, always one point to the left from wherever
the centre is. He sees it as pragmatism. By forty, he had disappointed the left
wing Caffè. Draghi was now a Director at the World Bank. In April 1987,
overtaken with grief that neoliberalism has triumphed over the left in
economics, his disciples dead or fading, Caffè, the great Keynesian,
disappeared. He was never seen again. Some say he committed suicide; others
that he had taken himself to a monastery in the Alps, to hide from the world he
saw coming.
In February
1992, Draghi is in the room at Maastricht when the Euro begins: a key counsel
to the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, when he signs the treaty. He
has long left Caffè, the left and his thesis behind. The mood is ebullient; the
popularity and success of the new EU’s single currency will sweep all before
it. So much so that at the press conference, Helmut Kohl bets six bottles of
German wine that Britain will join the project by 1997. “The government always
does what the City wants,” he booms. “The City will ensure that Britain joins
monetary union.”
Across continents, his former student peers were
rising and rising. As economists they believed in intervention
The British
departed with an “opt-out”; the Italians with conditions so tough the Germans
were surprised they agreed to them. Draghi’s second mentor, Modigliani, was
outraged. The decision to sign was Draghi’s: he was one of two Italians with
ultimate authority on assessing the terms. He had counselled the prime minister
to proceed with what in his thesis he called “madness”: a currency union
without a political and economic union. Why? The answer: his neoliberal theory
of Italian politics.
Midday in
Rome. Sometime in the 1990s. a city of politics, alleys and corridors. Bells
ring in the Senate. Matters are adjourned in the Palazzo Montecitorio. Suits
disperse. Reporters shout questions. The whole torrent of activity seems to
spill out and invade the streets around Piazza Navona. Negotiations continue
under the umbrellas at Giolitti’s gelato. Civil servants meet ministers in the
Hotel Forum. This is Draghi’s natural habitat. Heading the Treasury from 1991;
it was here that the fortysomething civil servant did whatever it took to join
the single currency: regulating Italy’s banks, managing its debt and
privatizing over €100bn. Draghi was more than indispensable. He built Italian neoliberalism.
There was
no better school than Rome for Euro politics: it was already a game of weak
politicians and powerful technocrats. An abstract Italian painting hung over
his desk at the Palazzo delle Finanze. Outside, “the first Republic” was
falling apart. Exposed as a clientelist mess of mafia connections and
kickbacks, all four parties in the ousted 1992 government would disappear.
Holding the
country together was the strongest bureaucracy Italy had: the financial
engineers in the civil service under the country’s first technocratic prime
minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Draghi was in his element. Capitalism, he
believed, had rules. As long as the politicians got out of the way and the
technocrats set the right structure, stable growth would follow. This was the
MIT philosophy. Across continents, his former student peers were rising and
rising. As economists they believed in intervention: to help make the market
function.
De Benedetti soon realized Draghi was a sphinx.
Secretive. Astute. He never gave anything away
This was
why the Euro was imperative. Capitalism could provide the rules — and the
structure — that Italy lacked. Politicians would now be curtailed in
macroeconomic policy. Signing up to a single currency put the fundamental
levers of the macroeconomy — key fiscal and monetary policies — beyond domestic
politics. This strategy was known as il vincolo esterno, the external bind.
Italy was
doing so well. Its economy was larger than Britain’s; living standards were
closing in on Germany. The early nineties was Italy’s moment: Tuscan wine
displacing French in the US. Gucci and Prada were conquering the world. The
tycoons wouldn’t risk this. They wanted help. By 1992, the young Draghi had
caught the eye of one of Italy’s richest men, Carlo De Benedetti, then owner of
both La Repubblica, L’Espresso and a slew of regional newspapers. They would
meet often and discuss the Euro. “If Italy had not been part of the Eurozone,
it would have been like Egypt or North Africa,” De Benedetti recalled. This is
what elites feared in the 1990s: without il vincolo, a return to the 1970s.
But De
Benedetti soon realized Draghi was a sphinx. Secretive. Astute. He never gave
anything away. But what did he want from him? “Once I asked him: I benefit from
our conversations. But what do you get out of them?” Draghi smiled, “He said he
liked to talk to someone from real life.” De Benedetti was right to ask.
Because Rome had already taught Draghi important lessons. Never let anyone know
what you’re thinking unless you have to. And always, always make the right
friends: among the media and tycoons. One day, you will need their favours.
Draghi’s
political touch had not gone unnoticed. In parliament, he was often called “Mr.
Britannia”, because of his endless meetings with London bankers. Salvatore
Biasco, then a left wing lawmaker, from his committee watched Draghi slowly
arrive at what would be his greatest realization: you can exert most power as a
technocrat. “He behaved like a minister of the Treasury and not a civil
servant,” recalled Biasco. “He was a sort of shadow Treasury minister.” Here, as
an unelected politician, was where he honed the technocratic Draghipolitik that
would shape Europe.
Draghi’s generation believed they had got it all
right. Then 2008 hit
All stories
about European money end up in London. In 2002, Draghi became vice president of
Goldman Sachs International. The friends, the seminars, the tycoons: it had all
paid off. So, it appeared, had his strategy. A populist, Silvio Berlusconi, had
become prime minister again in 2001. But so what? He was boxed in by il
vincolo: his hands far from the real levers of power. Rome’s financial
engineers were relaxed. Italy had not been profligate: it had run up a large
national debt in the 1980s due to high interests it had imposed largely to
bring inflation down to keep pace with the European monetary system that
preceded the Euro. The coming boom would surely erode it.
Draghi’s
generation believed they had got it all right. Then 2008 hit. The financial
crisis revealed these engineers had made a terrible mistake. They had broken a
system they would now spend the rest of their careers trying to fix.
This would
transform central bankers from the technocratic rule setters of capitalism into
the political crisis managers who guided it — and in so doing reorder power in
the EU forever.
Dumb luck
would give Draghi his chance to join these new supermen. First a corruption
scandal opened up a vacancy for governor of the Bank of Italy. Then, refusing
to countenance unorthodox ECB monetary policy to fight the crisis, the head of
the Bundesbank long expected to succeed France’s Jean-Claude Trichet, resigned.
With Berlin now without a candidate, the ECB prize opened up to another big
state’s central banker.
Media
management would ensure that Draghi got it in June 2011. The German media hated
the idea of an Italian in the Eurotower. Angela Merkel was hesitating. De
Benedetti received a call: the bill for the breakfasts was finally in. The
normally suave Mario, he said, was hysterical. “He had become mad,” De
Benedetti remembered. Bild had run a cover story about Italy. “Mamma Mia,” it
read. “For Italians, inflation is a way of life, like tomato sauce with
spaghetti.” “He called me and said, ‘What can you do for me?’” remembers De
Benedetti, “He was concerned it was harming his image.” A meeting with the
tabloid’s owner was arranged. A glowing portrait followed with a front page of
Draghi accepting a spiked Prussian helmet from Bild. “Mario was always very
thankful,” said De Benedetti. Cultivating his technocratic image has from the
start been core to Draghipoltik.
Draghi
approached the top job politically. Again he got lucky. Jean-Claude Trichet had
ended his mandate so badly that any successor would look good in comparison. In
the words of the historian Adam Tooze, “On his way out of office, Trichet, by
only backing austerity governments in the market, had helped Berlin to hardwire
austerity into the circuit board of the EU.” It was bad economics: this led to consumption
depression prolonging the recession. But Draghi would go further. In August
2011, he signed a secret letter to the Italian government: an austerity note
urging cuts and labour reforms. Rome was horrified; Berlin was delighted. By
signalling that Frankfurt was only prepared to put its liquidity behind a
certain type of politics he opened the door to ousting Berlusconi. A
technocratic government replaced him — which the fallen leader called an EU
“coup”.
Mitterrand’s mistake enhanced German power. German
exports boomed
Draghi’s
circle continued to shape capitalism: Ben Bernanke was heading the Fed and
Stanley Fischer was in charge of the Bank of Israel. In Frankfurt, Draghi would
treat the Eurotower like the Treasury in Rome, boasting, “In every press
conference since I became ECB President, I have ended the introductory
statement with a call to accelerate structural reforms in Europe.” Central
Bankers had crossed the line: no longer technocrats, they were now politicians.
Stepping
inside the ECB in Frankfurt is like putting on noise cancelling headphones.
Between the blue glass and the elevators, everything is suddenly hushed. But
its air conditioned chill has seen some of Europe’s most high stakes meetings.
Soon after he became a central banker, Maurizio Franzini, an old friend, asked
Draghi how he was handling the anxiety of such a big job: “He said he was still
taking cold showers every morning, a coping technique he had learnt in the
United States.”
In
Frankfurt, Draghi would master the three modes of European power: the
charismatic — the politics of persuasion — with which he would claim power for
his bank; the technical — the politics of rules — with which he would be the EU
enforcer in Greece; and the analytical — the politics of numbers — with which
he would win the battle to guide capital flows with quantitative easing.
Together these would come together into Draghipolitik — with which he would
move the German dial. His challenge was in the very design he agreed to.
François
Mitterrand had made the Euro his price of unification. He forced Kohl to make
good on vague commitments to a single currency. France wanted the Euro to
restrict German power. Mitterrand said the Deutschmark was Germany’s “nuclear
weapon”. He feared unless he had a say on German interest rates, Paris would
forever be forced to shadow them. He was mistaken. It wasn’t the currency. It
was German credit that was the nuclear weapon. Agreeing a single currency
without a Eurobond, a safe asset all could draw on to finance themselves in
times of trouble, meant German bonds became the Eurozone’s safe asset. Berlin
now had a de facto veto over debt politics.
Mitterrand’s
mistake enhanced German power. German exports boomed; the competitiveness of
Italian exports declined, France’s stagnated. The Euro had made German goods
cheaper than if they had been in Deutschemarks and Italian goods more expensive
than they had been in Lira. Berlin could take on new debt with little risk. The
rest were not so lucky. After 2008, weaker governments needed the Union to buy
their bonds, bail them out and collectivize their debt. But Kohl agreed to the
Euro on condition there would be no collective debt; that the ECB would not
directly finance governments. Berlin had to be convinced. Euro politics became
a game where everyone danced around Merkel trying to get her to turn on the
taps. At this, Draghi was king.
The EU’s
problem is not that it’s a superstate, it is that it’s not a state. A crisis
had appeared which had a clear solution. But no central authority existed to
implement it. From Podemos to Syriza, politicians were elected to build a
fairer Eurozone. But their hands were far from the real levers of power. This
is where Draghipolitik came into its own: the technocratic art of moving
Berlin. Through this he made the ECB a real central bank and himself a player.
First, Draghi used charismatic power to move Merkel and markets. According to
Nicolas Véron, one of the leading researchers on the Euro crisis, Draghi played
a historical role as “the chief pedagogue” who persuaded the Chancellor to
agree to a banking union in 2012. “This is where Draghi excelled, said Van
Rompuy. “He had great persuasive power: talking clearly, to the point and with
natural authority.” He told Merkel: this is in the German interest and it’s the
bare minimum you must do. That is the strength and the limits of Draghipolitk.
The errors made by the world’s elite central
bankers made them more powerful than most politicians
This was
just enough credibility to claim Berlin was behind the Eurozone. He then
multiplied it. Watching Draghi say “whatever it takes” was like Hegel watching
Napoléon at Jena. “It is indeed a wonderful sensation,” Hegel wrote, “to see
such an individual, who, concentrated at a single point, astride a horse, who
reaches out over the world and masters it.”
But who was
the horseman? Was it Draghi? Was it Merkel? Or was it the markets? According to
the political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar, then Van Rompuy’s adviser, those
sixteen seconds contain it all. “If you listen carefully; first there’s the
technocratic. He says, ‘within our mandate’. Then, there’s the political,
‘whatever it takes’. And only then, there’s charismatic authority, ‘And believe
me, it will be enough.’ And that’s what makes him the horseman.” The following
day Hollande and Merkel confirmed. He had opened the way for the ECB to
backstop sovereign debt markets. His charismatic authority had convinced
traders that power lay behind the Euro: using the bare minimum.
As Greek
finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis encountered yet another of Draghi’s
political qualities: ruthlessness. Seen from Frankfurt, a Greek default
followed by a European banking collapse loomed unless it could get a hold of
the situation. When Athens tried to push more of the hit onto creditors,
putting the bailout to a vote in 2015, Draghi signalled he would stop emergency
loan assistance to its banks. “The free-for-all against us was led by Mario
Draghi,” Varoufakis recalled in his memoir. This was the EU politics of rules at
its most brutal. But by punishing the EU’s most profligate states with
austerity bailouts, he won trust in Berlin to further Draghipolitik.
Finally,
Draghi mastered analytical power: that is the politics of numbers. On
powerpoint in the Governing Council, Giuseppe Ragusa, a former ECB senior
economist, watched him overcome the frugal Bundesbank to launch quantitative
easing in 2014. “The way he was able to convince people to do what he did,”
said Ragusa, “was by moving the political debate from politics to actual
numbers.”
These
meetings again changed European capitalism. Genuinely free markets, which had
opened in the 1970s with the lifting of capital controls, closed. Directed
capitalism came to Europe with the ECB incentivising markets to buy riskier
assets by buying over $2.8 trillion safer ones by 2018. It was the ultimate act
of intervention without redistribution. Draghi was convinced the Euro would not
survive deflation and a third recession without it. But his mistakes had
worsened the very problem he was trying to solve with austerity prolonging the
pain in the south.
Italy has gone from the country of the Red
Brigades to a country for old men
A
whisperer, an enforcer, a number cruncher. These are not the qualities one
expects of a great man. But that is to misunderstand how the EU works. Its
machine was built to depoliticise politics; and those who do that best, thrive;
the unassuming bureaucrat becomes Napoléon. Through Merkel, the media and data,
Draghipolitik overcame Jens Weidmann, the head of the Bundesbank. “Draghi
considered Weidmann his personal enemy,” said De Benedetti. It was mostly an
icy affair. But once at dinner, said Salvatore Bragantini, a friend, his wife
Maria Serenella Cappello, let this slip into the open: “‘So you are my
husband’s enemy,’ she said, taking him aback.”
As the
crisis made the state more dependent on finance; finance become more dependent
on the state. And men like Draghi were central to it. These victories reveal
enormous skill. They turned the ECB into an even more powerful institution than
the Bank of England. But they also underline how badly his generation got it
wrong. They had bet on a half-built house for Europe as the key to stability.
But a monetary union without a fiscal union brought instability. They had bet
on setting neoliberal rules for capitalism and stepping back: and it had blown
up. They had bet on austerity: then faced a depression. These errors made them
— the world’s elite central bankers who then had to fix it all — more powerful
than most politicians.
In his
brief retirement, after 2019, Draghi spent much of his time on the phone. He
called presidents past or present: Bill Clinton, Emmanuel Macron. Or the other
supermen who led central banks in the crisis: Ben Bernanke, formerly of the
Fed; Mark Carney, previously of the Bank of England, or Stanley Fischer, who
led the Bank of Israel. “He is the only man in Italy who can call anyone in the
world,” said De Benedetti. He has built his career through networks. And his
wealth: the home in Rome, one in Umbria, one on the Lazio coast and a new villa
in Veneto.
All through
life, Draghi’s personal and political bets have paid off. But at the same time,
his great bet, the one he took with Italy — il vincolo esterno — has failed.
The geopolitics failed: it has not helped manage German power. The economics
failed: Italy has maintained one of the toughest fiscal regimes in Europe,
running a primary surplus almost every year since 1995. Yet Italy has got
poorer. In 2000, its average standard of living was 98.6 per cent of that of
Germany. Today, Italian per capita income is 20 per cent below those over the
Alps. These are the long term consequences of austerity, bottled reform and the
Euro making exports uncompetitive. The debt Italy ran up in the 1980s has
become its albatross. Draghi’s growth never came.
And in its
very success, the politics failed. Populist politicians and coalitions flirting
with exit were unable to escape Draghi’s order. But Italy has been trapped in a
loop of increasingly weak populists, punctuated by weak technocrats. Both have
failed on their own terms. With growth-starting macroeconomics out of their
hands, the politicians in Rome seize on identity politics, not reform. Growth
is stifled. Government is feeble. What Italy needed was strong leaders after
all.
Tellingly, Macron’s success only came when he
embraced Draghipolitik
Italy has
gone from the country of the Red Brigades to a country for old men. Italian
industry, Italian football and Italian cinema have all gone into decline. A
generation of Italy’s most ambitious have once again emigrated. In 2010, the
cult TV show Boris, captured the sour mood. “This is the future of Italy,” says
a script director in a now iconic line. “A country of merry jingles, whilst
outside there’s only death.”
At the
start of the pandemic the same story started happening again. But this time,
Macron convinced Merkel to shift on her deepest redlines — collective EU debt.
Germany consented to a one-off €750 billion of Covid loans and recovery grants.
Tellingly, Macron’s success only came when he stopped being more like Greece’s
Yanis Varoufakis, with speeches at the Sorbonne emphasizing his mandate, and
embraced Draghipolitik to move Berlin. It was a decisive breakthrough in the
manoeuvres against the frugal Europe that Draghi had begun.
But Italy
is not only a country for old men: it is the country, it seems, for the same
men. One last time, he was ready when another man made a mistake. “Since he
left the ECB, Draghi’s ghost was hovering over Italy,” said one source. “It was
after the corona fund deal that he became interested in a political return.”
Phone calls
to the president; phone calls to Renzi; phone calls to Berlusconi; when the
government of Giuseppe Conte imploded; Draghi had a pitch. He would be a
technocratic prime minister: but with a twist — a mostly political cabinet
bringing in all parties but the furthest Right. He was offering himself as a
solution to the very problem il vincolo esterno had fuelled: weak politicians
unable to lead.
“The
truth,” said the historian Marcel Gauchet, “is that Europeans do not know what
they have built.” This is what the struggles of Draghi reveal. As Europeans,
his generation has built a halfway house for Italy. The Euro means they cannot
go back to national models of economic management, devaluation and default. But
the road forward: to a debt relief, transfers and fiscal union, is blocked too.
Stuck, the politics of mandates won’t work: the only politics that seems to, is
Draghipolitik.
Rising in a
face mask in the Italian parliament, the non-party technocrat — but the master
of politics — surveyed his six-party coalition stretching from the right-wing
populists of the League to the left leaning moderates of the Democratic party.
He also saw his historical chance. Nobody knows better than him, the real
politics of Europe is the politics of Eurozone debt.
Draghi needs to do the opposite of what he first
set out to do and foster a new generation of strong politicians to succeed him
This is why
Brussels and Paris are now watching Draghi. Can he successfully invest Italy’s
€200 billion from the Covid fund? “The prime minister sees his economic mission
like this,” said a senior Italian official. “He is seeking to demonstrate how
the new joint debt of the corona fund can reboot Italian growth. Draghi has
made the case for a strong fiscal backstop to address future risks in the euro
area.” Spending the money wisely is his route to make the fund that permanent
backstop. If he can keep his coalition together, Draghi can govern in this way
until the next scheduled election in 2023. At which point, he is expected to
aim for the presidency. “This has long been the role he would have preferred,”
said one source.
A Euro
collapse is now unlikely. That is his legacy. The risk that Europe faces now is
that the Euro system — the unfinished house — slowly does to the EU as a whole
what it has done to Italy, putting it on a permanently lower growth trajectory.
The EU needs collectivised debt for more collective stimulus. But will Merkel’s
heirs agree? With all the implications for sovereignty to what is ultimately —
a transfer union? Until someone can pull off the next painful step of
consolidation, the risk is that the Union continues to lose the battle for
globalisation. Draghi shows what’s possible.
But the
price of Draghipolitik is this: it is consolidation without democracy.
Empowered elites with alienated voters. Politics only men like him can play.
Which, by weakening parties and the importance of elections, makes the only
other way to get to a better Europe, a transnational, democratic movement for a
fairer Eurozone, even less viable. Draghipolitik may offer a path to a
technocratic solution but it exacerbates the political problem.
Today he sits
on the zeitgeist: promising to begin Italy’s exit from neoliberalism, his
latest fiscal thinking lines up perfectly with Bidenomics. But it is not
enough. He now needs to do the opposite of what he first set out to do: and
foster a new generation of strong politicians to succeed him. Only that can
break the cycle that is weakening Italy.
Draghi is
fond of quoting The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel of a
Sicilian noble adjusting to life in a new Italy united by Cavour and Garibaldi.
“Everything must change so that everything can remain the same,” is the ironic
maxim quoted time and again. Yet by the end of the novel, a united Italy really
has come.
But what is
this Europe? This system, Draghi’s system, is one that has depoliticised itself
in order to survive. That it has. But at the cost of no longer being able to
distinguish between stability and stagnation. A system that can only do the
bare minimum. Not whatever it takes.
Davide Lerner contributed reporting.
Source: https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2021/the-sphinx-who-reshaped-europe/
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