Today Prime Minister Renzi’s attempt to centralize the Italian government in order to render it more subservient to the EU occupiers is going to fail. This will be the second domino to fall after BREXIT, the third may be the ascension of the nationalist Austrian Freedom Party to the ceremonial role as President:
Donald Trump’s victory—which shocked Europe’s political and media elite—gives the populists backing the “No” side of Italy’s referendum the political rocket fuel they need for a virtually guaranteed win.
That momentum will be all but impossible to reverse. Anti-elite sentiment is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. And I bet the global populist revolution will continue.
If Italians buck the establishment—and it looks like they will—it will clear a path for a populist party to take power and for Italy to exit the euro.
If that happens, the fallout will be catastrophic for global markets. The Financial Times recently put it this way:
An Italian exit from the single currency would trigger the total collapse of the eurozone within a very short period.
It would probably lead to the most violent economic shock in history, dwarfing the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008 and the 1929 Wall Street crash.
If the FT is even partially right, we’re looking at a possible stock market crash of historic proportions. This is why we’re watching the December 4 referendum so closely.
The referendum is meant to concentrate more power in Italy’s central government. On that point alone, everyone should oppose it. The centralization of power never leads to good things.
A “Yes” vote is effectively a vote of confidence in the current pro-EU Italian establishment. This is what the global elite wants.
A “No” vote is how the average Italian can give the finger to the faceless EU bureaucrats in Brussels, whom many blame—quite correctly—for their problems.
Trump’s win has been a double whammy for Italy’s pro-EU establishment.
First, it emboldens the populist forces fighting the referendum.
Second, it humiliates and politically castrates Matteo Renzi, the current Italian prime minister. Renzi took a rare step when he openly endorsed Hillary Clinton. He was the only European leader to do so.
As one of Renzi’s rivals said after Trump’s victory, “Matteo Renzi is politically finished from today, he’s a dead man walking.”
Other Italian politicians are furious that he weakened Italy’s standing with the new Trump administration….
Austria
Austria is holding a presidential election, also on December 4. It’s actually a redo of an election held in May, where a populist candidate, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party, barely lost.
Austrian courts found irregularities in the results and ordered a prompt new election. But when opinion polls showed the populist candidate in the lead, the government delayed the vote until December 4, giving a lame excuse about faulty adhesive on absentee ballots. Despite the foot-dragging, Mr. Hofer looks set to win the December 4 vote.
France
France has a presidential election next spring. There’s a chance that Marine Le Pen, leader of the Eurosceptic National Front party, will do better than many expect. After more than a decade of disappointment under presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, French voters are clamoring for something different.
Spain
Spain recently re-elected incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. However, Spanish voters fled traditional political parties en masse for new populist upstarts Podemos and Ciudadanos. So Rajoy was unable to form a majority government. Rajoy now leads a severely weak minority government. The political power of the Spanish populist parties is only expected to grow.
Germany
Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, embodies the European establishment more than any other politician. Her party suffered a series of stinging defeats in regional elections this year, mostly because of her signature lax immigration policies, which have flooded Germany with migrants. Merkel’s troubles have only helped the Alternative for Germany, a new populist party surging in popularity. The party could pose a real problem for Merkel in the 2017 federal elections.
The NetherlandsAs the Netherlands approaches elections in March, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which advocates leaving the EU, is basically tied in opinion polls with the establishment parties.
Meanwhile, the children of EU elites are literally being raped and murdered by the very “refugees” they welcomed inside their nations. Their trans-European globalism isn’t merely untenable these days, it is very nearly as intellectually finished as Communism.