This is a pan-southern-European pushback against austerity happening while the package is still being negotiated
In all the dozens of summits and meetings held over the past couple of years about how to keep the euro show on the road, one subject has been notably absent. Amid all their talk of haircuts (on debt values) and tranches (of loans), European leaders have barely talked about the people who are bearing the brunt, first of the crisis and then of the throat-clearing that passes for firefighting in Brussels. This is not accidental. The euro project has relied upon draining the politics out of the inherently political: the very existence of a 17-nation economic union without a common treasury is testimony to that.
Especially amid austerity, however, it is impossible to ignore the politics. More than 200,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Athens on Wednesday. Thousands besieged parliament in Madrid on Tuesday. Last week more than half a million people marched in cities across Portugal to protest against cuts in social security. This is a pan-southern-European pushback against austerity, while the package is still being negotiated. The political strains are causing old regional fissures to re-emerge. One fifth of the population of Catalonia, 1.5 million people, marched last week in what can only be interpreted as a surge of separatist sentiment. For them it is not just the contract with Brussels and Frankfurt that needs to be renegotiated, but the contract with Madrid – in other words, the constitution. With regional elections coming up on 25 November, this is not something Madrid can ignore. Initially they wanted to collect their own taxes, which they would share with Madrid. When that was rejected, the price of peace escalated. Popular outrage over Catalan money going elsewhere, amid health and education cuts, is fuelling demands that the money stays put.
On Thursday the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, unveils an austerity budget which is meant to pre-empt Brussels' conditions. When Spain is finally forced to ask for a bailout, it can say that the conditions demanded are the ones that it is already enacting. But this will only rub more salt into the wounds at home. With his absolute majority, Mr Rajoy was meant to be the leader who could deliver the austerity necessary to secure a future national bailout. That no longer looks certain, which is why Spanish bond yields went soaring yesterday. This in turn will hasten the outcome both Madrid and Brussels have been stalling on.
The Greeks and the Spaniards are committed Europhiles. No one has forgotten the history of coups and dictatorships from which membership of the EU served as a release. The EU has not stopped being the future. But its funds can no longer be called structural. Destructural funds are nearer the mark for millions of ordinary citizens. And everyone in the EU will pay the price.
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