{"id":305521,"date":"2025-07-31T02:55:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T02:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/305521\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T02:55:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T02:55:09","slug":"how-a-failed-italian-bank-merger-exposed-the-eus-struggle-to-enforce-its-economic-vision-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/305521\/","title":{"rendered":"How a failed Italian bank merger exposed the EU\u2019s struggle to enforce its economic vision \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A similar showdown had taken place in Spain earlier this year, with Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s partial obstruction of national lender BBVA\u2019s move on the Catalan lender Sabadell to preserve support in Catalonia, a vital political constituency. Berlin, meanwhile, is also gearing up for a confrontation with UniCredit, which is seeking to take control of national champion Commerzbank.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, this all reflects tension between the EU&#8217;s efforts to promote the creation of homegrown global banking heavyweights and the immediate national priorities of governments.<\/p>\n<p>In Italy, for instance, the events were cast as an epochal struggle between free-market liberalism and resurgent protectionism, with the international, profit-hungry UniCredit \u2014\u00a0 dubbed the banca apolide, or the \u201cstateless bank\u201d \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/europe-finance-elite-italian-bank-brussels-belgium\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cast<\/a> as an embodiment of the increasing \u201cfinancialization\u201d of Italian banks that would occur under the EU\u2019s competitiveness drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Officials griped that top-down calls to create banking behemoths were in conflict with the EU\u2019s own slow pace in agreeing on policies \u2014\u00a0such as deposit insurance schemes and banking backstops \u2014 that would protect member states from the risks of cross-border monopolies.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is a growing disconnect between the rhetoric often heard at EU level \u2026 and the choices made by some member states when concrete merger operations are on the table,\u201d said Judith Arnal, a senior research fellow at the Brussels-based CEPS think tank.<\/p>\n<p>One Italian treasury official pointed to the irony that the Commission was itself pushing a protectionist agenda \u2014 with its renewed fixation on muscular bloc-wide industrial policy to preserve &#8220;strategic autonomy&#8221; \u2014 while rebuking protectionism at the national level, showing scant respect for the &#8220;sovereigntist&#8221; principles on which its own president, Ursula von der Leyen, cruised to her second term in office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A similar showdown had taken place in Spain earlier this year, with Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s partial obstruction&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[3427,331,9654,7706,6641,30,2000,21386,299,5187,1196,2199,2441,28458,5338,46,1217,2343,48,332,104,7497,1220],"class_list":{"0":"post-305521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-banking","9":"tag-banks","10":"tag-capital-markets","11":"tag-catalonia","12":"tag-competitiveness","13":"tag-courts","14":"tag-eu","15":"tag-eu-treaties","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-european","18":"tag-insurance","19":"tag-italy","20":"tag-markets","21":"tag-mergers","22":"tag-pedro-sanchez","23":"tag-policy","24":"tag-protectionism","25":"tag-research","26":"tag-rights","27":"tag-russia","28":"tag-spain","29":"tag-strategic-autonomy","30":"tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114945597461688869","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}