Upheavals in Europe

Europe, thrown into a bit of turmoil most recently, witnessed unusual upheavals on Friday when Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy became his country’s first leader to be unseated in a revolt in Parliament even as a new government took over in Italy as populist parties took the reins in an unusual arrangement under a virtually unknown Prime Minister. While it was a corruption scandal involving his Popular Party members that brought Mr Rajoy down, it was a polarised Catalonia threatening to break away from Madrid which helped the process along. It does not seem to have helped that Mr Rajoy may have been steering Spain away from the deep financial crisis of the early 2010s as the country goes into period of great uncertainty just as the socialist, Pedro Sanchez, was sworn-in on Saturday. The events have left the European financial markets shaken even as it deals with Donald Trump’s trade war.

There will be choppy times ahead in Italy as well where Giuseppe Conte heads the new populist government that ended months of political deadlock and the threat of snap elections being ordered as the last one threw up such a mixed verdict. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far right League Party are certain to be strange bedfellows under the political novitiate of a PM. While a government in place should bring some relief, those quaking should be the illegal immigrants as the new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has declared that a priority of his government would be to send at least half a million, undocumented migrants home. Beyond the question of Italy’s problem with immigration is the issue of keeping financial commitments. And then the even larger question of an eurosceptic government toying with the idea of delinking from the euro in its quest for economic sovereignty.