Eurozone policymakers have decided to “suspend politics as normal” in Greece and Italy because they deem it to pose “a mortal threat” to Europe’s monetary union. “The sidelining of elected politicians in the continent that exported democracy to the world was, in its way, as momentous a development as this week’s debt market turmoil,” says Tony Barber in the FT.
What we have witnessed is no less than a bloodless coup d’etat, says Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. Elected prime ministers in Athens and Rome have been toppled in favour of Eurocrats – respectively a former vice-president of the European Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, and a former European Commissioner, Mario Monti. The “putsch” (orchestrated by the so-called Frankfurt Group, an unelected, unaccountable cabal comprising eight people including German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy) is the “logical culmination of the European scheme, which has always been an anti-democratic project”, lacking popular support.
“What is terrifying is that these ‘technocrats’ caused the disaster in the first place.” They prioritised the survival of the euro, presided over the rise in spending and debt, and “deliberately overlooked the debt criteria when the euro was launched to admit Italy and Greece”.
They’re now taking us down a dangerous path, says Fraser Nelson in The Spectator. “The idea of a prime minister chosen by foreign powerbrokers will be no more popular in Rome than it would be in Berlin. The idea of an ersatz politburo in Frankfurt will unnerve those EU members who lived under a real one in Moscow.” The Lib Dems’ revered EU is “vanishing before our eyes”, replaced by a “more unequal union, with bullying lenders and enfeebled debtors”. But if an “undemocratic hit squad” led by the Germans impose severe cuts and find ways of raiding the savings of Italian households, “the political reaction may be incendiary”.
Their strategy may not even work, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The danger is that the “most diligent eurozone workers” will end up like Boxer in Animal Farm, “nobly making every sacrifice for something that cannot be achieved”. Austerity isn’t the best cure for “anaemic growth and falling demand”, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian.
But austerity is what the markets demand for “manageably low rates of interest on the money they lend to governments”.
That it is the money men, not those we elect, calling the tune is nothing new. The question is who can “dance to it most nimbly, and in that endeavour democracy is an impediment”. Democratically elected leaders can’t impose austerity on an unwilling population without paying a price and they’re “saddled” with checks and balances that make firefighting in a crisis tricky. The same isn’t true in Moscow or Beijing, which “can switch budgetary priorities in a heartbeat”. It’s no coincidence the world’s most authoritarian states are faring better during this crisis. This year has “punctured the sense of easy supremacy democratic societies used to enjoy”.