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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.
Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?
P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?
This website has a predominantly US readership, I think .
In other news, the Euro and Pound are in freefall , the former down 5% and the later down an astonishing 10% over the past month. This show how bad things are over there even compared to here. Inflation higher ,too. It's a mess over there due to a combination of poor policy, risk aversion (flight to safety trade), and other factors, and will probably get worse. Western Europe pretty much missed out on the entire 90s and 2000s tech boom and you can see it the huge difference between the returns of the US vs. UK stock market starting in the early 2000s which has continued since . There is nothing to be optimistic about over there .
I really do hope they find some new productive niche, as coasting on reputation and accumulated capital is not a sustainable strategy, and attempting to leverage those to be "regulatory leaders" would probably just exhaust those stores faster.
I am witnessing first-hand the EU's desperate attempt to create such a niche in a small communications related field. It is pathetic unfortunately. One clearly gets the idea that anything productive has been taken over by the Americans or the Chinese and this is just scraps. Furthermore, most of the academics involved are Chinese/Indian anyway so even if this stuff produced something useful, who knows how much they will contribute to Europe actually.
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