Gatestone Institute: Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is leading an effort to create a pan-European populist alliance to challenge the pro-European establishment over the future of the European Union. The aim is to reclaim sovereignty from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and transfer key EU powers back to national capitals.
Germany and France, the self-appointed guardians of European integration, are responding to the challenge with an ambitious counterplan to make the European Union a “more decisive power on the world stage.”
The showdown, which threatens to split the European Union down the middle between Eurosceptic nationalists and Europhile globalists, will heat up in coming weeks and months, ahead of elections for the European Parliament in late May 2019.
During a visit to Warsaw on January 9, Salvini, now the most powerful politician in Italy, said that populists from Italy and Poland should spark a “European spring” and forge a “new equilibrium” to replace the influence of Germany and France in the European Parliament:
“The Europe that will be created in June will be different from the one of today, which is managed by bureaucrats. In Europe, one has always spoken of a French-German axis. We are preparing for a new equilibrium and a new energy in Europe. There will be a joint action plan that will infuse Europe with new blood, new strength, new energy. Poland and Italy will be the protagonists of this new European spring, this revival of true European values, with less bureaucracy and more work and more family, and above all more security.”
h/t Forcibly Deranged.
WTH???
It’s not an AXIS. It’s the ALLIES. Italy, France, England. The Axis is Germany and all it’s dependent satellite states.
Man, we did this literally 100 years ago.
Italy had better be careful. Their last experience with joining an Axis didn’t work out very well.
That Talk like American Allies Ally talktalk.
AXIS Journalists awe thunder struck
Staked
Wonder what happen to Berlusconi? Look West as Grexit is slowly emerging too. But the EU welfare might be too much to say no to. The government coalition has collapsed and yes, immigration is way up. Oh, and Erdogan built a wall on the Syrian side to keep ’em out.
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2019/01/12/greece-records-threefold-rise-in-migrant-arrivals-over-land/
@Big Owe–Berlusconi’s establishment mentality finally caught up with his anti-establishment PR schtick and facade– he’s the object of much ridicule from his old supporters. What Salvini represents is the prevailing mood in Italy that the last time Germany got power, things did not go swimmingly for Italy or for Europe in general.
The thing about Salvini that is encouraging is that the youth unemployment rate is causing the younger voters in Italy to demand that they be given jobs, not the “refugees” from north Africa; Salvini had a very large chunk of the youth vote for him and it’s scaring the EU and its multiple establishments because it (nationalistic and sovereign beliefs) is not confined to Italy’s borders.