After too many flights of fancy, lies as big as a house and sailor promises, in the end Europe is the real watershed of the Italian electoral campaign: Pd and Forza Italia on one side, Lega and Cinque Stelle on the other. The European Commission also makes it clear that yesterday it rose up in the face of the out of this world words on the white race of the Northern League candidate for the Lombardy Region, Attilio Fontana.
Both the vice president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans and the head of economic affairs, Pierre Moscovici, have bluntly branded the racist and xenophobic regurgitations of Fontana and the League, in turn infuriating Matteo Salvini, who speaks of undue interference. "Racism is unacceptable and we must protect the values shared by Europeans, including equality" thundered Timmermans.
But Moscovici went further speaking of a political risk for Italy and for Europe if a government emerges from the polls in March that promises to derail the European rules on budget matters. Moscovici considers the proposal of the leader of the Five Stars, Luigi Di Maio to exceed the 3% ceiling as "absolute nonsense", which serves to prevent "the debt from rising further and therefore serves to revive growth".
The European concern is that Italy will face a period of instability giving relief to all the anti-European extremisms of the Old Continent and becoming an element of contagion for other countries.
This is why, in the face of the alarm from Brussels which could also weigh on the European markets, Forza Italia suffers from the alliance with Northern League extremism and tries to give credence to its moderate line by relying on Merkel's European People's Party and the President of the European Parliament, Tajani, who could be a Berlusconi card for Palazzo Chigi. And that's why Matteo Renzi tempers the criticisms of European rigorism of the Teutonic mold, and tightens the time to crown the alliance between the Democratic Party and +Europe of Bonino and Tabacci, which could see the light in the next few hours.
