Ecco la famosa intervista di Calderoli sul Daily Telegraph
'The euro was supposed to bring security but we cannot live like this'
By Toby Harnden in Rome
(Filed: 12/06/2005)
In his marbled office overlooking the Piazza Colonna, Roberto Calderoli, Italy's minister of welfare, held up a €20 note and cheerfully tore it in half. "If you like, I will put it through the shredder," he said.
He briefly contemplated setting fire to the note before concluding that this might be against Italian law. There could be no doubt about his feelings towards the euro.
Mr Calderoli's views would have been heresy at the start of 2002, when Italy enthusiastically embraced the single currency as interest rates halved and a boom was ushered in. Yet at the Campo de' Fiori market a few streets away, where the former monk Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for contending that the universe had no centre, hatred of the euro is a new orthodoxy.
"Look at this square," said Sonia Proietta, filling a paper bag with tomatoes. "It used to be bustling but now it is half empty. Since the euro, everything is much harder. Prices have doubled. The euro was supposed to bring security but we cannot live like this."
Mr Calderoli's Northern League, a small Right-wing party that holds the balance of power in Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition, is championing the euro's abandonment during a strange upsurge in popular nostalgia for the lira, never the most stable or loved of currencies.
Tomorrow, the Northern League will meet in Milan to discuss "concrete proposals" for a referendum on establishing a new national currency, possibly linked to the dollar, to run alongside the euro.
With progress on political unity halted by the French and Dutch rejection of the European constitution, Mr Calderoli said, monetary union was doomed. "They constructed the roof - the euro - without building the walls beforehand."
EU leaders are livid about the sustained anti-euro rhetoric from a country whose economy is the weakest in the eurozone. "It is just inconceivable that a country could envisage dropping out of the euro," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and current European Union president. Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, branded the very question "absurd" and "complete nonsense".
Yet Mr Calderoli and his ilk have struck a chord in Italy, where the general election is less than a year away. Mr Berlusconi's last government collapsed in 1994 when the Northern League defected. With his popularity rating plummeting, he is anxious to keep them on board. Nicoletta Maggi, the Northern League's chief spokesman, said anti-euro views were also held in the Forza Italia Party of Mr Berlusconi, who has previously blamed the euro for Italy's economic woes and has yet publicly to disagree with Mr Calderoli. "They think it but they will not admit it," she said. "They don't want to be in the centre of an argument so they won't speak out now. But in a few months, they will. They do things after us. It's the domino effect."
She accused Mr Berlusconi's centre-Left rival, Romano Prodi, a former prime minister and European Commission president, of taking the country into the euro with the lira undervalued. "Prodi is the culprit," said Miss Maggi.
With Italy the weakest link in a chronically under-performing eurozone, economists have begun to suggest scenarios in which it would either leave the currency voluntarily or act in such a way as to destabilise it and hasten its collapse.
They warn that reverting to the lira would lead to rocketing interest rates, a loss of foreign investment and deepening recession. Yet the alternative is a very unItalian fiscal restraint and deregulation of an outdated economy which relies on small companies producing high-quality, labour-intensive goods, struggling to remain competitive against Far Eastern rivals.
Stuart Thomson, a strategist with Charles Stanley Sutherlands, a stockbroker, compared Italy's euro dilemma to Argentina's economic crisis in 2001. "The sacrifices involved in staying in a fixed exchange rate with the dollar outweighed the one-off, short-term pain of leaving," said Mr Thomson. "The same is potentially true of Italy."
The French and Dutch referendum results, he argued, were down to the euro. "The euro economy has not performed in line with expectation. That's the fault of domestic economies but the euro is the scapegoat because it's the most obvious element to ordinary people."
Italy's traditional remedy against inflation was to regain competitiveness by devaluing the lira, an option no longer available. With France and Germany already flouting the stability and growth pact requirement that deficits should not exceed three per cent of gross domestic product, there is little chance of Mr Berlusconi falling into line with Brussels despite being censured last week for the size of Italy's deficit.
Indeed, the pro-EU Centre for European Policy Studies recently raised the spectre of a eurozone break-up. In a report, it predicted that a continuing Italian deficit could lead to Rome demanding that the European Central Bank pursue an expansionary monetary policy.
Such a policy, it suggested, could be supported by France and Germany as a way of combating unemployment. If the EU lacked the political unity to resist the move, the euro would succumb to inflation - and reverting to a stable national currency would appear increasingly attractive to member countries.
Mr Calderoli, at least, has no doubts about the course Italy should take. "The options are to apply euthanasia to the euro or let it die on its own," he said. "If we do the latter, we will experience agony but the result will be the same."