{"id":384340,"date":"2025-08-30T05:30:21","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/384340\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T05:30:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:30:21","slug":"the-hypocrisy-of-mario-draghi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/384340\/","title":{"rendered":"The hypocrisy of Mario Draghi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cFor years,\u201d Mario Draghi proclaimed<\/a> last week, \u201cthe European Union believed that its economic dimension, with 450 million consumers, brought with it geopolitical power and influence in international trade relations.\u201d But this year, he said, would be remembered for when that illusion evaporated. As the former European Central Bank president and erstwhile Italian premier explained, the EU has been pressured by the United States into accepting damaging tariffs and needlessly high military spending \u201cin ways and forms that likely do not reflect Europe\u2019s interests\u201d, even as it had been reduced to a mere \u201cspectator\u201d everywhere from Gaza to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Draghi is often praised for his rare bluntness in assessing Europe\u2019s condition, a quality that has earned him a reputation as one of the continent\u2019s most insightful thinkers. And, certainly, he is right in arguing that the neoliberal architecture of the EU \u2014 grounded in \u201ca conscious reduction of the power of states\u201d in favour of rules-based market mechanisms \u2014 has left Europe woefully unequipped to navigate a world where military and economic power are increasingly deployed to protect national interests.<\/p>\n

The problem is, Draghi\u2019s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious \u2014 facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests. The acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi\u2019s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate. But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe\u2019s malaise, he consistently fails \u2014 deliberately so \u2014 in properly diagnosing their underlying causes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is not lack of integration but integration itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

For if he is right to say that the EU\u2019s neoliberal framework \u2014 based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and an obsession with boosting exports \u2014 has weakened Europe, it\u2019s a policy cocktail that he himself helped blend. He was an architect and enforcer of that model. Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (\u201cexternal constraint\u201d) \u2014 the idea that only by \u201ctying the hands\u201d of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatisation of Italy\u2019s state-owned enterprises.<\/p>\n

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019, and the act that symbolically marked the beginning of his tenure couldn\u2019t be more paradigmatic.<\/p>\n

In August 2011, at the height of the so-called \u201ceuro crisis\u201d, Draghi and his outgoing predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet sent a letter to the Italian government. Intended to remain secret, it was subsequently leaked<\/a>. The letter claimed that Italy\u2019s post-crisis deficit-cutting plan was \u201cnot sufficient\u201d, and set out detailed demands, including \u201cthe full liberalisation of local public services\u201d, \u201clarge scale privatisations\u201d, wage reductions and even \u201cconstitutional reform tightening fiscal rules\u201d. Giulio Tremonti, Italy\u2019s then-minister of economy and finance, later privately told a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters that year: one from a terrorist group, the other from the ECB. \u201cThe one from the ECB was worse\u201d, he quipped.<\/p>\n

Draghi must have concluded that the conditions set out in the letter had not been met, because a few months later he \u201cforced\u201d (to quote<\/a> the solidly neoliberal Financial Times) Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favour of the unelected Mario Monti. Draghi achieved this\u00a0by discontinuing the central bank\u2019s Italian bond\u00a0purchases \u2014 thus\u00a0deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety\u00a0levels \u2014 and\u00a0by making Berlusconi\u2019s ouster the precondition for further ECB support of Italian bonds. This was belatedly admitted by none other than Monti himself, who\u00a0claimed in a 2017 interview<\/a>\u00a0that, in late 2011, Draghi \u201cdecided to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which had kept the Berlusconi government afloat in the summer and autumn of 2011\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly \u201cindependent\u201d and \u201capolitical\u201d central bank using monetary blackmail to oust an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet all evidence suggests that\u00a0this \u2014 a\u00a0monetary coup\u00a0d\u2019\u00e9tat \u2014 is\u00a0exactly what happened in Italy in 2011. Just a few years later, Draghi deployed the same tools against Greece, effectively shutting down the country\u2019s banking system to force the government to comply with EU-demanded austerity policies, which Yanis Varoufakis, Greece\u2019s then-finance minister, likened to a form of \u201ceconomic waterboarding\u201d.<\/p>\n

Even in his brief role as Italian premier, between 2021 and 2022, Draghi continued these policies. The few \u201cstructural\u201d measures enacted by his government were all aimed at promoting privatisation, liberalisation, deregulation and fiscal consolidation \u2014 while he imposed on his country some of the most draconian Covid policies in the world.<\/p>\n

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe\u2019s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalised by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU\u2019s structural subordination to Washington.<\/p>\n

The EU\u2019s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a good case in point. In his much-discussed report on European competitiveness, published a year ago this week, Draghi highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU\u2019s loss of competitiveness. The report emphasised that European companies face significantly steeper prices compared to their US counterparts, seriously hindering industrial growth and investment.<\/p>\n

Fair enough \u2014 yet this was hardly an act of God. Rather, it was a direct consequence of the EU\u2019s decision to decouple from Russian gas, which before the war accounted for almost half of the bloc\u2019s supply, in favour of much more expensive American liquified natural gas (LNG).\u00a0More to the point, this policy was vehemently supported by Draghi. Shortly after Russia\u2019s invasion, he defended as prime minister the EU\u2019s decision to impose a gas embargo on Russia, from which Italy imported around 40% of its gas. \u201cDo you want air conditioning or peace?\u201d, he asked<\/a>, the logic stark in its dubiousness. Draghi was likely suggesting that sanctions would soon cripple the Russian economy and force an end to the war \u2014 a scenario that anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economic and geopolitical realities could have dismissed from the outset.<\/p>\n

A few months later, in a speech<\/a> at the UN that in retrospect appears almost comically misguided, Draghi doubled down, claiming that the sanctions had imposed \u201cextremely harsh costs on Russia\u201d and had \u201ca disruptive effect on the Russian war machine and on its economy\u201d, making it \u201charder for Russia to respond to the defeats piling up on the battlefield\u201d. As we know, none of this came to pass \u2014 the Russian economy proved resilient, the war machine kept churning, and the defeats mounted not in Moscow but in Draghi\u2019s delusional forecasts. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted by many of us.<\/p>\n

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be lauded<\/a> for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage \u2014 or pelted with rotten eggs. That he so easily evades accountability is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards.<\/p>\n

But if Draghi\u2019s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the EU\u2019s problems is bad enough, his proposed solutions are worse still. For Draghi, the cure for the EU\u2019s dysfunction is \u2014 to give the EU even more power. \u201cThe European Union will have to move towards new forms of integration\u201d, he declared in his latest speech. Translation: yet more political, fiscal, military and technological centralisation. In other words, then, Europe\u2019s problems, in Draghi\u2019s view, can only be solved by transferring still more authority to Brussels and further sidelining national governments and parliaments.<\/p>\n

But the last thing Europe needs is to give even more power to people like Draghi. On the contrary, if the continent is to have any chance of reversing its decline, it must reject the delusional dogma of \u201cmore Europe\u201d and finally hold to account the very technocrats who built the crisis-ridden order they now pretend to diagnose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cFor years,\u201d Mario Draghi proclaimed last week, \u201cthe European Union believed that its economic dimension, with 450 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[299,14441,1699,24767,2199,74928,12,285,133336,6861,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-384340","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-european-central-bank","10":"tag-european-union","11":"tag-integration","12":"tag-italy","13":"tag-neoliberalism","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-russian-sanctions","17":"tag-single-market","18":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115116076246890487","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384340","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=384340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}