Mario Monti, the fake pretender

Mario Monti seeks to become again Italy’s prime minister without the nuisance of polls and ballot boxes. Monti wants the support of most political parties so he can keep appearances above the vulgarity of electoral travails. We are led to believe that he already enjoys the backing of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Monti has been widely praised by several European newspapers, and named as “the Brave” by some Spanish dailies. Isn’t somehow shocking, though, the relentless rejection of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, while showing a blind admiration for a bureaucrat appointed from Berlin? Why are these portrays so extreme, the Bad and the Good, as if Berlusconi and Monti embodied two pure, impossible-to-combine choices? Does it not sound suspiciously elitist and almost anti-democratic?

After all, what has Monti done for Italy, apart from obeying the orders coming from Brussels and Berlin? Some figures seem clearly alarming, like a GDP falling by -2.5 percent or double than in Spain, and an unemployment rate rapidly increasing–as reflected in the charts above.

Italy’s public debt, at 120 percent of GDP, has not improved because the economy has contracted at a higher speed than the deficit. So again, why should we trust Monti, his management of the crisis, with barely a criticism?

Europe cannot afford to thwart democratic elections by imposing leaders that only follow Brussels’ diktat, governments that only serve the European Union superstructures and the German interests. It does not work like that.