On February 28, I wrote a piece with a premonition: ‘Italy: the crisis that could go viral.’ On March 10, I did a follow-up with a more urgent message: ‘Italy will need a precautionary bailout—a financial firewall—as the coronavirus pushes it to the brink.’ A lifetime has passed since then and the incoming data for
Ursula von der Leyen was an unloved choice to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European Commission. She emerged from a ferociously contentious process as a last-minute compromise and she promptly fell into a storm of criticism. Even members of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) shellacked her. In the thankless role of
This “Brexit election” was about a lot more than Britain and the European Union. It was about the future of globalisation. As Gordon Brown underlined after the referendum, voters who chose to leave the EU had suffered unrelenting indignities on the “wrong side of globalisation”. These voters rang the alarm bells again in the European
