Donald Tusk, who runs the European Council, attempted the Bratislava Declaration and Roadmap in September 2016. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker won plaudits for his 2017 Future of Europe white paper, but tanked when six months later he put forward a specific plan that wasn’t mentioned in the initial paper. Emmanuel Macron attempted to start the EU’s traditional Franco-German motor for reform, and kept pushing in his speech accepting the Charlemagne Prize this week; but the French president has found himself blocked by a German election stalemate and then a government in Berlin allergic to ideas like a eurozone finance minister.
With the U.K. leaving, Spain mired in its own Catalan constitutional crisis, and Poland neck-deep in rule-of-law complaints from Brussels, that leaves only Italy to help get things moving again. The 5Stars pitch themselves as EU reform-minded: If they stay true to that promise, it would come as pleasant surprise for Tusk, Juncker & co. The odds are higher, though, that Italy will struggle to build a consensus, let alone a European one, and thus close the door on EU reforms before 2020. [...]
Yet an Italian euro-exit is hardly off the table either. Beppe Grillo, the 5Stars’ founder, last week revived the idea of forcing a referendum on Italy’s membership in the single currency. It is, after all, in the party’s DNA — and we all know what usually happens when the EU goes on the ballot (see France and Netherlands in 2005, Ireland in 2008, Britain in 2016, pick your year in Denmark). [...]
The success of these two parties brings home the changed mood among Italians. That’s especially true for the young. In a 2017 poll, just over half of people under 45 said they would vote to leave the EU if Italy holds a referendum on EU membership (while 68 percent of respondents over 45 supported staying in the bloc).
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