Italy

Italy's new prime minister will be an ex "European Commissioner" rather than an ex-banker, but otherwise the story is similar: the internal political process in the indebted country has failed, and the new leader belongs to a supranational ruling class. Only it seems that I had misidentified the ruling elite: it's not the financial class, it's the Euro-technocratic class.

Normally, party politics provides the public face of democracy, and the civil service stays out of sight. But now we see the traditional politicians displaced from power, in favor of open technocratic rule. Furthermore, the agenda that the new governments serve is coming from outside - they will be implementing "austerity" and "reforms" demanded by "the European Union".

It has been suggested that Greece's quandary was largely due to the currency union. If they still had their own currency, the drachma, they could have devalued. I think that what we are seeing now is the further, political consequence of this impotence. These countries are not only without their own currencies, they are no longer in charge of their own political destinies.

In the previous post, I promised to say something about Papandreou's short-lived idea of a referendum, and about the Irish presidential debate. The Irish debate achieved notoriety because the leading candidate was brought low by a single satirical "tweet" that was brought up by the debate moderator. But what caught my eye was a failed attempt by the last-place candidate to bring up Ireland's debt deal with the EU and the IMF. There are calls for a referendum in Ireland too, though so far this idea doesn't have any powerful backers.