There is an invisible thread linking the salons of the radical left and the raucous platforms of homegrown sovereignty movements: the unshakeable conviction that the economy is a sort of financial Hogwarts, where all you need to do is wave a magic wand to make money appear.
The important thing is never to open a maths book.

On the one hand, we have the champions of redistribution, convinced that to make everyone rich, all you need to do is fleece a wealth that nobody bothers to create any more; on the other, the keyboard patriots, certain that waving a tricolour flag will scare the global markets and cause interest rates to fall purely out of patriotic spirit.

At this festival of magical thinking, Italy is treating Brussels to a tragicomic spectacle that we would gladly do without.

The masterpiece of sovereignty: the epic tale of the ESM

To understand how propaganda can blind people to the point of geopolitical absurdity, one need only look at the saga of the ESM ratification. Italy has remained Europe’s last, solitary outpost to refuse to sign the reform of the bailout fund. A record to be proud of, were it not for the fact that it borders on sheer amateurism.

The sovereignist narrative has portrayed the ESM as the bogeyman under the bed, a plutocratic plot to place the country under administration.
The small technical detail – which the propaganda systematically censors – is that ratifying the reform did not mean activating the loan for us. It merely meant allowing the other twenty-six countries to activate the safety net for the European banking system.
A system in which, incidentally, Italian banks are not exactly disinterested bystanders.

The result of this defiant stand? We have blocked a continental protection mechanism out of fear of tweets from the domestic opposition. Isolating the country at European negotiating tables, thereby undermining the state’s financial credibility in the eyes of the markets that buy our public debt – which has happily broken through the 3 trillion euro barrier – is not defending the homeland. It is merely the performance anxiety of a political class that confuses international treaties with Monday’s opinion polls.

Mercosur: when free trade becomes a criminal offence

But sovereignty really comes into its own when it encounters open markets. Take the EU–Mercosur agreement, for example. A trade deal that would open up a market of over 250 million consumers and boundless reserves of raw materials to European businesses.
For a country like Italy, which relies on exports and manufacturing, this should be a dream come true.

And yet, here is the League taking to the barricades, ready to join forces with the French radical left to scupper the whole thing. The excuse is the usual corporatist defence of individual niches, with hyper-regulation elevated to the status of dogma. This approach reveals the true nature of protectionism: a total lack of confidence in the ability of our production system to compete. They prefer a protected and stifled economy, ignoring the fact that if Europe shuts itself away in its little fortress, Latin America will simply hand itself over, lock, stock and barrel, to China’s commercial penetration. But looking beyond the boundaries of one’s own constituency is an effort that autarkic rhetoric cannot afford.

The left’s obsession: redistribute first, then (perhaps) create

Whilst those on the right barricade themselves behind borders, those on the left prefer to dig straight into citizens’ pockets. The great progressive mantra boils down to a religious obsession: the wealth tax. The reasoning is disarming: if there is a budget deficit, the solution is to raise taxes on the ‘rich’ (a category which, in Italy, includes anyone earning just one euro more than the average).

The logical fallacy is obvious. Before redistributing wealth, we should first consider how to create it. Without private investment and without incentives for capital accumulation, there is nothing to redistribute but shared poverty. If you stifle producers with the threat of compulsory levies, capital will not allow itself to be fleeced without a fight: it will simply fly off to Switzerland or Singapore.

This fiscal gluttony goes hand in hand with a fetishisation of inefficient public spending. Whenever there is a tentative attempt to make budgets more efficient, the progressive propaganda machine switches to autopilot, screaming about ‘savage cuts to services’. It doesn’t matter if those funds were financing unproductive white elephants. For the left, public spending is an absolute value in itself, regardless of the quality of the services actually provided.

To top it all off, we have the ‘bonus’ culture. A mind-boggling proliferation of one-off handouts that artificially inflate short-term demand and leave behind a trail of bad debt that future generations will have to pay off. It is the replacement of structural welfare with state charity for electoral purposes.

The red-brown energy axis: kowtowing to Moscow to save money

There is one area, however, where opposing forms of extremism come together in perfect harmony: the geopolitics of energy. The main arena for this ‘red-brown’ convergence is the stance towards Russia.

Here, the anti-Atlanticist far left (driven by the old conditioned reflex of anti-Americanism) and pro-Russian sovereigntists are joining forces behind a surreal argument: the only solution to high energy prices would be to bow to pressure, lift the sanctions and go back to buying gas from Moscow.

A monumental piece of propaganda. The idea that energy dependence on a single, monopolistic and politically unstable supplier was a far-sighted strategy is an insult to our intelligence. Putin’s ‘cheap gas’ was no bargain: it was a trap, and we paid the true price for it all at once.

A truly pragmatic approach has shown the opposite to be true: high energy prices are tackled by diversifying suppliers, through regasification terminals (opposed by NIMBY committees of all political persuasions), through the integration of the European market, and by embracing next-generation nuclear power. To argue otherwise is to hand over the continent’s industrial keys to a blackmailing autocrat.

The revival of economic reason

Europe can no longer afford the luxury of being an open-air testing ground for populist fantasies. Cross-vetoes on treaties, obstructionism regarding stability mechanisms and an aversion to growth are luxuries that a continent in industrial decline cannot sustain.

True strength is not built by erecting tariff barriers or inventing new taxes. It is built on institutional integrity, freedom of enterprise and markets capable of attracting capital rather than scaring it away. It is time for economic policy to be governed once again by the figures, consigning fairy tales of redistribution and autarkic manifestos to the shelves of the second-hand bookshop.