Opinion | A Cheer for Italy's Awful New Government - The New York Times - 0 views
-
They are on to something, and that is why they won, just as Trump won because he intuited a seeping anger that too many liberals had ignored.
-
They are right that almost three decades of globalization since the end of the Cold War has left too many people behind in too many Western democracies, starved them of hope or even a say, and given them the impression that the system was rigged by elites in Brussels or other metropolitan hubs.
-
The 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent euro crisis came and went with near total impunity for those responsible. Until Western democracies confront their failings, the tide of popular rage won’t abate.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
The European Union has failed Italy because promised solidarity in taking in immigrants reaching Europe through Mediterranean routes hardly materialized. In 2017, Italy received over 60 percent of such migrants
-
It has failed Italy because the rigid fiscal constraints of membership of the euro — set up to ensure that Italy’s budgetary laxness and administrative inefficiency would not be a problem for Germans — have proved unsustainable, engendering growing resentment toward Chancellor Angela Merkel.
-
let Salvini and Di Maio and Giuseppe Conte, the new prime minister whose inflation of his academic credentials is not reassuring, go to work on the mess. It’s much better to have them fail on the inside than have them rail from the outside. It’s better to have them lose support through failure than gain support through bluster.
-
a core beauty of the European Union is that its interlocking institutions are designed precisely to ensure that no country can go off on what the Germans call a Sonderweg — the sort of wayward path of nationalism and mysticism and racism that led Germany, and all of Europe, to ruin.