If Rome and Madrid cry, Paris certainly does not laugh. In fact, France, like many other EU countries, is grappling with a profound economic crisis that has hit companies, employment, social security and health care. The salvation of President Francois Hollande is that the transalpine welfare state can afford to fire a few more cartridges and manages to intervene effectively where the "bubo" is about to burst. You see some creeping nationalizations that are making their way into some manufacturing and banking sectors. See the provision in favor of the employment of young people, which finances 75% of hiring. See the recent (mild) pension reform. In short, France still has the possibility of buying time and postponing some structural reforms, waiting for the recovery to appear. In this helped by the consolidated axis with the German locomotive, both on the economic and on the political front. All this, however, in the absence of a charismatic political leader and a government that has so far done little to relaunch the country. As if to say that Francois Hollande's left hasn't been better at the moment than Nicolas Sarkozy's right, expelled from the Elysée at the end of his first term. But Paris still matters. It counts in Europe, it counts globally, it is respected. He sits and has decision-making power in all the "clubs" that matter: from the G8 to the UN, from the EU to NATO. He raises his voice just enough to be heard and, many times, to act as a counterweight to the Anglo-American axis.
Italy and Spain do not. They are in the south of the EU. They are something else with respect to the circle of countries that is above the Alps and the Pyrenees. They are considered unreliable and suffer a handicap that is cultural, not to mention ancestral. Of course it is a generalization of the problem, an extreme one, but it is now established that a good percentage of the differential that Rome and Madrid pay on the spread with respect to Berlin is due to the diffidence that the financial-political community has towards Southern Europe. But there are other factors as well.
Italy has for years been "spliced" by a political crisis that never ends and which prevents it from launching medium-long term reform projects for the recovery and modernization of the country. Economic policy is absent, as is sensitivity to supporting businesses and therefore to the production framework. It is therefore not surprising that companies close down, that unemployment (especially among young people) has skyrocketed, that the public debt continues to grow and that the GDP is negative. In these conditions it would be a miracle otherwise.
For its part, Spain is paying for the unscrupulous economic policy of Aznar first and then of Zapatero. Who have forced the development of the country by drugging the real estate sector and consequently also the banking-financial sector. Spain's advantage over Italy is that it is a young country, which can still hope for the future: the infrastructures are there, the big multinationals too. It is sparsely inhabited, has a large territory: not only restricted to the confines of the Peninsula, but extended to Latin America. An outlet valve that is pure salvation for the accounts of banks and companies in the country. As long as Spain doesn't suffer a decline like the Italian one and the mafia powers don't take over. In the case of vaunted nationalisms such as that of Catalonia, in the case of a federalism that has gone too far, in the case of too many links between politics, business and finance. Prime Minister Rajoy, in the eye of the storm for illegal financing of the party and other things, is warned. But the monarchy is also warned, which has lost much of its polish and has recently got its hands dirty in some unclean business.
