A potentially significant moment in the travails of the EU was lost in the drama of John Major’s (re-)intervention into the Brexit debate on Monday. Over in Italy, another former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, also made an intervention. He called for Italy to introduce a separate currency alongside the euro which would allow it to ‘recover monetary sovereignty’. Berlusconi half floated a suggestion along these lines back in 2014. But now he says he is ‘completely convinced’ by it. He suggests that Italy should keep the euro for imports and exports, while using a different currency – a new domestic money supply – for state payments to ‘help the left behind’.
Berlusconi’s policy is, in some ways, an interesting mirror of Marine Le Pen’s policy of allowing big business to use the euro while introducing a new currency to put in people’s pockets and use for the French national debt. It’s as if both of them are calling for something akin to John Major’s ‘hard ECU’, or at least a system of so-called parallel currencies.
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