Andrew McKie: Italian turmoil shows it is Brussels, not the voters, which gets the final say

Both parties are routinely described as “populist” and Eurosceptic, but that’s about all that they have in common. The Lega, which draws its support from the prosperous north of the country, is Italy’s answer to Ukip; anti-migrant and anti-Brussels and, until recently, allied with Silvio Berlusconi’s right-of-centre Forza Italia. The Five Star Movement, a newer set-up, was founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo, a sort of Italian Russell Brand, and resembles a Corbynite Green Party.

READ MORE: Looming Italian election seen as referendum on EU and euro

Unlike its namesake, the poptastic Pearson family from Romford, Five Star is primarily System Sceptic. A sense of its general approach can be got from its motto, vaffanculo, which translates as “f*** off”. It likes extravagant public spending and hates corporations, and wants the European Central Bank to write off a large chunk of Italy’s national debt (which is the third highest in the world, and 132 per cent of its GDP).

At the most recent election, this populist stance turned out to be popular, too: Five Star got 33 per cent of the vote, the most of any single party. But the Right, of which the Lega is the main grouping, got 37 per cent. Since that wasn’t enough to govern, and since Five Star, in one of its more sensible political stances, refused to deal with any coalition that involved Silvio Berlusconi, Italy ended up with the strangest pairing since Michael Jackson hooked up with Lisa Marie Presley.

But President Mattarella’s decision to veto the appointment of a Eurosceptic economist, Paolo Savona, as finance minister, may have stalled the nuptials. Five Star’s leader, Luigi Di Maio, called for the president’s impeachment, while Matteo Salvini of the Lega argued for fresh elections (something which might well strengthen both parties’ support).

READ MORE: Looming Italian election seen as referendum on EU and euro

The reason these political negotiations have an impact far beyond Italy is that they illustrate the inconvenient problem of populism for the EU, which is actually a general democratic problem. For a decade, in large part because of the financial crisis, voters all over Europe have had an increasingly sceptical view of political elites. While France and Germany have, so far, narrowly avoided populist governments, and the tendency in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Greece can be dismissed as peripheral, fragmented and temporary, Italy, even in its current state, will be the EU’s third largest economy after Brexit.

You don’t need to have any sympathy for either the protectionist, nationalist agenda of parties like the Lega, France’s Front National, or Germany’s AfD, or for unrealistically utopian radical Leftists like Five Star, Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, to see that their support is a rejection of the grander European project. Or to notice that it indicates a sense of disfranchisement, both political and economic.

This was always bound to happen, because of the EU’s interpretation of what “ever closer union” ought to mean. And in that sense, the logic of Eurofanatics such as Guy Verhofstadt, who want a federalised European state with unified economic, foreign and defence policies controlled from Brussels is correct. As the EU’s founders anticipated, you can’t have fiscal union without political union.

But this position, or at least an acknowledgement that it is fundamentally undemocratic, is often unspoken – precisely because it has practically no popular support in most of the nations of the EU.

The dire problems of major European countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain are, of course, a result of their own past poor government and misguided economic policies. But there is this to be said for them: the electorate of those countries opted for those governments and policies. Yet when national democracy is deemed incompatible with the EU project, it is Brussels, rather than the voters, which gets the final say.

Italy has already had some experience of this. At the end of 2011, the Italian electorate’s opinions on how to handle the financial crisis were completely ignored and Mario Monti – a former European financial services commissioner who had never been elected to any office – was imposed as Prime Minister (and promptly appointed a cabinet entirely composed of unelected technocrats like himself).

READ MORE: Looming Italian election seen as referendum on EU and euro

The current Italian president’s reason for rejecting Mr Savona was that he wanted a finance minister who “isn’t seen as a supporter of a line that could probably, or even inevitably, provoke Italy’s exit from the euro”. In other words, Italy’s obligations as a member of the Eurozone matter more than the views of the voters.

Even the (fairly small) group of those who think that the EU is the nearest thing to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and that nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of “ever closer union” must surely acknowledge that this is a recipe for trouble.

It’s precisely the airy dismissal of populist movements and the concerns of their supporters by existing political elites which provides them – however ghastly or misguided their views may be – with political cover and moral authority. Mr Di Maio was able to say, after President Mattarella’s decision: “Why don’t we just say that in this country it’s pointless that we vote, as the rating agencies and financial lobbies decide the government?”

Whether this is true or not – and perhaps even if you think, as so many of the bureaucrats in Brussels appear to, that if it isn’t, it ought to be – the evidence is that statements such as those have a real, and increasing, appeal to voters all across Europe. And when the people disagree with the view that the man in Whitehall, or the Rue de la Loi, knows best, there’s the alarming prospect that you end up with something worse. The EU’s intransigence has already led to Brexit; it could yet lead to further disruptions.