If Lapalisse had been born in Rome and had made his career between the Treasury, the ECB and the palaces of Brussels, today he would be called Mario Draghi. His speech at the Rimini Meeting is proof of this: a florilegium of obviousness and self-assertions, peppered with the usual recipe, “more Europe,” which translated means more constraints, more bureaucracy, more common debt.
A Europe without politics, without soul, without values, which the technocrat Draghi cannot understand, because politics-the real kind-he does not understand and, as he demonstrated as Prime Minister, often even despises.
Draghi starts with the big breakthrough: “2024 will be remembered as the year when the belief that Europe’s economic size was enough to guarantee it a geopolitical role dissolved.” Really? And who was for decades among the main architects of this Europe reduced to a soulless political supermarket?
That’s right, Mario Draghi, the banker who elevated the dogma of technocracy to a system of government, refusing to confront the parties during his government and choosing not to measure himself against an electoral competition. On the other hand, there is to be understood: can you see someone like Mario Draghi in the suburbs listening to problems from Shiura Maria? But for goodness sake.
Right on time comes the whine: “we had to accept U.S. tariffs and increased military spending without fully reflecting European strategic interests.” Translated: the US defends its interests, Europe does not. No kidding. And again, “Europe made the largest financial contribution to the war in Ukraine but counted zero in the negotiations.” Small detail Draghi forgets: until Donald Trump returned to the White House, the word “peace” regarding Ukraine could not even be uttered.
The former premier then continues with China, which “does not consider Europe an equal partner and makes us increasingly dependent on rare earths.” Truly a dazzling revelation, too bad it was his Europe that opened its markets wide to Beijing, condemning our industries to subservience. And while China and Russia move with a secular vision based on continuity and preservation of their identity, Draghi proposes a Europe that seems to want to erase what it is, diluting itself into a homogenized political correctness.
Why should these powers respect us if we give up defending who we are? The most surreal passage is the one about the history of the Union: “it was natural to develop a collective system to protect democracy and peace. It is untenable to argue that we would be better off without this union.” Too bad that today that very Union has become a cage that stifles national sovereignty and paralyzes any strategic decision-making.
Draghi’s solution? More bureaucracy and common debt, without ever mentioning what Europe really lacks: a common foreign policy and a European army. Because Europe does not need more constraints, but more policy, the kind that Draghi, as a technocrat, has never understood.
During his government, he has avoided ethical issues, because for him values simply do not matter. An apolitical approach that, paradoxically, is reminiscent of the 5 Star Movement, whose economic disasters we will pay for generations.
So here is Draghi’s solution: “only shared debt instruments can finance major European projects.” No common foreign policy, no European army: only new shared debt, meaning new strings for states and new debt for citizens. In essence, evil as the cure for evil.
And while he proposes this reheated soup, he ignores the current “big picture”: the winds of history are blowing toward leaders like Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump, who make policy guided by a precise worldview rooted in the values of Western civilization. Meloni, who has had politics in her DNA since she was a girl, governs with instinct and a moral compass that Draghi lacks. Trump, likewise, combines economic battles with the defense of identity against woke drift, a tool of the globalists – Draghi’s friends – to deconstruct our societies, stripping them of all identity.
It goes without saying that the three dimensions-the economic, the identity and the social-must be part of an overall vision, an approach that has never even touched this Europe and people like Draghi, who concluded his speech with a marvelous, lapalissian seal: “Europe must transform itself from a spectator to an active player.” Applause.
Too bad it is precisely the Europe of the Dragons that has been reduced to an extra, while the world is divided between the United States, China and the new emerging powers. The result is there for all to see: a Union that does not know how to defend its interests, that legislates on the diameter of zucchini, that represses dissent and compresses democracy, but that has no common energy or military policy. Yet instead of acknowledging failure and being self-critical, Draghi offers us the same recipe as Macron and his mini-emuli nostrani, Renzi and Calenda: build the Europe of the elites against that of the peoples.
At a time when leaders like Trump and Meloni show that the globalist paradigm is at the end of the line, embracing the Draghi line would be suicidal; his Europe devoid of values, politics and identity cannot hold its own against powers that are clear about who they are and where they want to go.
