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From this readable article:

The Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was quoted as saying:

The more I study the draft budget, the more I like it.

The fact is that the fiscal plan drawn up by the new government will “fulfill election promises”. That is, the Italian people clearly voted in favour of the policies and the intervention of the European Commission merely highlights the anti-democratic nature of the European Union and its institutions.

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The common currency has only survived because the the ECB has been systematically breaching the Treaty rules, although claiming otherwise, and the Commission has turned a blind eye.

The fact is that the ECB has been funding fiscal deficits since May 2010 and while they can claim they have only been buying trillions of euro of government bonds as a ‘liquidity management’ operation, the truth is obviously otherwise.

Spiegel Online is clearly trying to sheet all the blame home to Italy.

They claim a pending crisis is:

… because a country like Italy doesn’t follow the rules.

They are silent on the on-going current account surpluses that Germany has been running, which have been well in breach of Eurozone rules.

The German external surpluses (three year average) have risen from 6.2 per cent of GDP in 2012 to 8.4 per cent in 2017 where the maximum allowed under the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure is 6 per cent of GDP.

Perhaps if Germany spent more domestically, the other Member States would not need to stimulate their own domestic demand quite as much.

It is ridiculous to isolate Italy in this current period and accuse it of undermining the Eurozone.

Last week’s national account data reveals how poorly the overall Eurozone economy is performing. That has nothing much to do with Italy and everything to do with the poorly designed monetary system which requires an austerity bias under its rules in defiance of the responsible use of fiscal policy.

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The impact of the austerity inflicted on Italy over the last many years will resonate for generations to come.

And these are real costs, not the confected ‘debt burden’ that is usually claimed to represent violations of intergenerational equity.

We can expect the unemployment rate to start increasing again as growth has slumped to zero.