Premature celebration?

• Position: OFF THE NEWS

A lot of commentators have fixated on Emmanuel Macron's recent defeat of Marine Le Pen for the French presidency as a sign that the European populist threat has dramatically diminished. Yet what still seems to worry the policy community are Italian politics in general and Italy's Five Star Movement in particular. With a national election sometime during the first half of next year, Italian politics for Europe are like a ticking time bomb. As one former ECB official commented to TIE, "Italy's Five Star Movement is a lot more threatening to the European experiment than were Le Pen, Jean-Luc Melenchon, or any of the other European populists. The Five Star Movement has a far greater...