Public polling shows most Italians like Europe’s single currency. It also reveals that increasing numbers think it is good for the country, and even larger numbers think it is good for Europe. The euro may not be as popular in Italy as it is in other countries that have adopted it. And Italians may be skeptical about the European Union more generally — with some truly strange polling data that suggests Italians would like to leave the EU but stay inside the euro. But the opinion polls gives us no reason to believe that Italians are hell-bent on staging a vote to bring back the lira.
There are other reasons to be optimistic as well. Italy’s economy has recently been improving, which generally takes some of the sting out of euro criticism. And even the League and its partners in the failed effort to form a government, the anti-establishment 5Star Movement, seem to understand that campaigning to leave the euro is no way to win an election. If they thought differently, they would have done that last March. Instead, they distanced themselves from their most extreme proposals and emphasized other issues instead: migration, security, taxes, a minimum basic income. [...]
For years, Italy’s ruling class has portrayed painful reforms not as necessary improvements to the economy, but as as impositions from Brussels, done at the behest of distant bureaucrats. What Salvini has done is taken the argument to the extreme: Only by breaking free from European tutelage can Italians have what they want.
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