Italy’s Brexit moment

Though he is a big fan of the European Union, Barack Obama brings bad karma to it. So perhaps he should not have chosen Greece and Germany, the two countries which illustrate so poignantly why the euro is doomed, for his last foreign tour.

His farewell visit is, if not a kiss of death, surely a bad omen for the EU and most immediately for one of those present in Berlin to bid him goodbye: Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who has called an all–important referendum on constitutional reform for 4 December. If he loses, as looks ever more likely, it could cause a run on Italy’s sclerotic banks that could engulf the eurozone.

Obama was certainly defying the gods last month when he gave his last state dinner at the White House — ‘a swirl of Dolce Vita diplomacy’, CNN called it — in honour of the 41-year-old Renzi. The Italian prime minister, who is the leader of Italy’s former communist party and the third unelected leader of this troubled country in five years, was praised by Obama as ‘bold’ and ‘progressive’. The outgoing President was generous enough to add: ‘I am rooting for [his] success.’ Renzi might ask David Cameron how that kind of support tends to work out.

Ten days later, a massive earthquake destroyed the Basilica of San Benedetto in Norcia, near Perugia, built on the site where St Benedict, patron saint of Europe, was born in about AD 480.

So, as Italy gets ready to vote, the omens are not looking good for Renzi, whose motormouth oratory about tough but progressive reform to drag Italy’s economy out of the mire earned him the nickname ‘Il Rottamatore’ (demolition man) — and catapulted him from being mayor of Florence to prime minister in February 2014 without so much as a general election.