One account of an EU-orchestrated putsch against Berlusconi was circulating last month (I posted something about it here).
Now via The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard there’s this:
So, we now know: Silvio Berlusconi seriously floated plans to pull Italy out of the euro in October/November 2011, precipitating his immediate removal from office and decapitation by EMU policy gendarmes. Ex-ECB insider Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi has quietly dropped a few bombshells in his new book Morire di Austerita (Dying of Austerity), worth a read if you know Italian. Mr Bini-Smaghi – until recently on the ECB’s six-man executive council, and for many years Italy’s man in Frankfurt – states that Silvio Berlusconi was toppled as Italian premier in November 2011 as soon as he began to rattle the EMU cage in earnest. Specifically, he discussed (threatened?) Italian withdrawal from the euro in private meetings with other EMU governments, presumably with Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, since he does not negotiate with underlings. (“L’ipotesi d’uscita dall euro era stata ventilata in colloqui privati con i governi degli altri paesi dell’euro”).
We have long suspected this. Now it is confirmed.
Mr Bini-Smaghi also reveals that Merkel continued to think that Greece could be thrown out of the euro safely as late as the early autumn of 2012, when the Pfennig finally dropped that all hell would break lose, with chain reactions engulfing the whole system. She then switched tack abruptly, rushing to Athens to praise the new government for its heroic efforts. “Merkel l’ha capito sole nell’ Autunno del 2012″.
People who follow these matters should also check out what Bini-Smaghi has to say about Target 2. It illustrates just how deep Germany has been dragged into effectively underwriting an enormous chunk of the Eurozone mess, and with very little in the way of informed democratic consent, a softer type of coup, if you like.
Former Greek PM George Papandreou (remember him?) probably would have welcomed a soft coup. It should not be forgotten that he, like Berlusconi, found himself at the business-end of something rougher when also he ‘resigned’ from his job in November 2011.
And then there was EU Commission president Barroso arguing yesterday that the (unelected) European Commission should be given “punitive” powers to police democratic rights within EU member states, a move of some chutzpah given how much that body has done to hollow out European democracy. The ’official’ reason for this (if one that Barroso would be careful about expressing too directly) is concern over developments in a number of Eastern European countries, but anyone who knows how the EU works will know that one of its favorite devices is the ratchet.
First they came for the Hungarians…