The surprise would have been if François Hollande had decided to run for a second term in 2017. Even so, the socialist president of France’s announcement on Thursday that he will not run again in the spring is another milestone in Europe’s political crisis. This weekend, attention will shift to Italy, which holds its much-anticipated constitutional referendum on Sunday, as well as to Austria, where the presidential election re-run may result in Europe’s first far-right head of state since 1945. The sense that the old order is under serial threat across large parts of Europe is palpable.
Mr Hollande’s unpopularity and withdrawal both stem from his manifest inability to provide an effective route out of the aftermath of the financial crisis, as well as fears exacerbated by migration and terror attacks. France’s growth is still sluggish at best, while unemployment, is still stuck at about 10%. Yet he has no clear successor. Whoever emerges with the socialist nomination after planned primaries in January will struggle to make it into the second round of next year’s election, probably leaving François Fillon and Marine Le Pen to fight it out on the right. Mr Hollande has been a personally undistinguished president, but the crisis is not his alone. The French left as a whole is divided and weak, bereft of leaders, confidence and ideas for tackling France’s social divisions.
Yet Mr Holland’s departure, coming soon after David Cameron’s in Britain and Enda Kenny’s skin-of-the-teeth return to power in Ireland, marks something wider. With some exceptions, notably Germany’s Angela Merkel, the leaders who offered western European nations new starts following the financial crisis are themselves losing out in the face of low growth and perceived social and cultural unease caused in part by immigration. This week it could be the turn of Italy’s Matteo Renzi, who has staked his future on the outcome of Sunday’s constitutional reform referendum, thus turning a relatively arcane issue into a personal vote of confidence.
Mr Renzi’s reform bill overhauls a third of a 1948 Italian constitution that is full of checks and balances designed to prevent the return of authoritarian rule. After nearly 70 years, however, these increasingly seem to prevent any effective government at all, rather than just the emergence of another Mussolini. Mr Renzi wants the upper house, the senate, to have its powers curtailed, with effective power largely vested in the chamber of deputies, in which the winning party would have a guaranteed and enhanced majority. He proposes to sweep away regional powers on subjects like infrastructure and energy and to compensate regional interests by making them the basis of the senate – an idea that Britain could look at too.
Renzi’s law contains enhanced powers, critics say, that could be misused by a future populist leader. But Italy is a country in need of economic reform. It remains divided between north and south and is subject to strong separatist pressures. Productivity rates are stuck at late 20th century levels, while reform of its banking, industrial, labour and tax sectors is gridlocked by a political system that has given Italy more than 60 governments since the second world war and, following reforms in the 1990s, has produced no outright majority-elected government, including Mr Renzi’s, since the fall of Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.
Italians should vote for Mr Renzi’s reforms. To reject them would be to reject more than just the constitutional package. But the possibility that he will lose is strong, not least because he has threatened to resign if he does. That could trigger not just another new government but a bond market and banking crisis that may threaten the eurozone. As Britain is learning the hard way, referendums can create problems in distressed times rather than resolving them. Italy is next in line to face this challenge to the old European order, and Italy may not be the last.
