Concerned comments prevail on the compromise to bail out Greece. While Tsipras has certainly lost, no one is arguing that Europe is doing well. To a greater extent, the right-wing anti-Euros such as Salvini and those of the left such as grillini, vendolians, and worshipers of Syriza in general are jumping through hoops to get out of the embarrassment.
The editor of Il Giornale, Alessandro Sallusti, in an attempt to demonstrate that Tsipras is only a communist adventurer, but that Europe is an association of coup plotters and blackmailers, brings out the 2011 story as a scoop when on the sidelines of the G8 in Cannes Germany and France, offered Berlusconi a loan of 50 or 90 billion from the IMF to avoid the risk of Italy's default, obviously linking it to a series of stringent conditions for the recovery of the country.
According to Sallustri, Berlusconi got up from the table offended shouting "Italy is not for sale!". The episode has been known for some time and has also been recounted in various books, and it did not go at all as Berlusconi recalls it, from whom Sallusti claims to have learned it. But we know that Berlusconi is so used to telling lies that he ends up believing them himself! In reality, Italy found itself in very serious difficulty as it was no longer able to place its securities on the market except at increasingly higher rates.
At that point the other European countries, worried about the consequences of a bankruptcy of 'Italy, offered to advocate an intervention by the IMF (at that time there were no European bailout funds). And Italy had gotten into trouble because of the promises that the Government had made over the summer, but which it had then decided not to keep due to the opposition of Forza Italia and above all of the League (Salvini would do well to remember).
Tremonti recounts that Berlusconi would have liked to accept, but that it was himself as Economy Minister who argued that the offer would not have been decisive and that indeed, it would have risked aggravating the crisis by spreading distrust on the markets about the fate of our country. So nothing came of it and then it was Berlusconi who had to pass the hand to a caretaker government capable of doing those things that he himself had promised, but he had not been able to implement.
Even comical are the affirmations of the grillino Di Maio (indicated by many as a candidate to lead the Government) who had gone to Athens to celebrate the victory of the NO in the referendum and who had waved his arms to talk about a rediscovered democracy and the victory of the peoples against the hate bankers.
Feeling betrayed by Tsipras who, instead of leading his country out of the Euro, signed an agreement deemed humiliating, he found nothing better than to blame the bad Germans who wanted a guarantee fund into which part of the public assets would flow intended for privatization (certainly not the Parthenon).
But Di Maio must not be very well versed in those pedestrian disciplines such as accounting or economic and financial balance sheets, as he has not understood that at least half of this fund is represented by shares of the banks which must be recapitalised with 25 of the over 80 billion that will be lent by Brussels to Greece.
Considering that Tsipras has always said he does not want to privatize anything, the idea of the fund can serve to overcome the distrust of creditor countries towards the Greek government. Nothing so outrageous. The attempt to unload all the responsibilities on Brussels and above all on the bad Germans reaches grotesque heights. Salvini on the one hand says that we must not give any more money to Greece and on the other that we must break the cage of European rules that are strangling us.
But isn't Europe giving new money to the Greeks? Scandal because the Greeks were humiliated as the sovereignty and democracy of a country ended. But what was poor Tsipras to do? Refuse the agreement and risk not only bankruptcy but also not being able to import foodstuffs, petrol and medicines, and thus take one's country back to the Middle Ages?
As for the 48 hours of time given to the Greek Parliament to approve the new plan, many ironies have been made without taking into account that times are tight precisely to avoid the default that would start at the beginning of next week, and that we have arrived in the Cesarini area at due to the hesitations and outright blackmail attempted by Tsipras and his former minister Varoufakis, who wanted new money without constraints in the name of a generic "solidarity".
Of course this does not mean that everything in Europe works perfectly. But it is not with this accumulation of nonsense that a serious change of what does not work can be set up. It is necessary to gain credibility in national policies and then go to battle in Brussels to correct what the governor of the Bank of Italy Visco recently defined as the asymmetries in the duties of adjusting imbalances which must not only weigh on deficit countries as "also those with a surplus have the same faults and the same responsibilities as those with a deficit”.
The road to making Europe is difficult and fraught with obstacles. But it is not with demagogues accustomed to messing around in the murky that we will be able to overcome our difficulties.
