An oldie but goodie. Godfrey Bloom was absolutely right that populism was coming at the EU in ways that it could not conceive. And today, they think they’ve reached peak populism with recent election results. But they haven’t. What they’re seeing in Europe now is only the end of the first up-wave.

This isn’t the end of populism, it is just the first pause in its rise. Watch this (it’s only 1:24 long), I’ll wait.

Because the technocrats in Brussels think they have dodged some bullets with the defeat of Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the recent poor showing by the Tories in the U.K. And so, they are ratcheting up their democratic mandates to impose even more on its marginal states like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The EU sued those three countries this week over not complying with Angela Merkel’s refugee policy. And Mrs. Merkel is using her recent by-election wins to gain leverage over them.

What’s coming next is a showdown between countries that have adopted the euro and those that haven’t. While these populations do not have strong support for leaving the EU they do have strong support (especially Spain and Italy) for holding a Brexit-style referendum on the subject, according to a recent report by Pew Research.

All eyes are on Catalonia’s October referendum to secede from Spain. Understand, this is not a spur of the moment thing. Catalans have been preparing for this for years now — drafting new laws, a constitution, setting up parallel institutions, etc. Catalonia is more than 30% of Spain’s GDP.

Spain is in debt up to the EU’s eyeballs. That debt is trading at obscene valuations.
And the valuation of that debt deteriorates immediately if Catalonia stops paying into Madrid’s treasury. At that point Spain will rolls tanks into Barcelona and the real face of the EU will be revealed. It is not a confederation of states as it was sold to the people but a tyrannical undemocratic oligarchy bent on ensuring continued German domination of the continent of Europe.

We are rapidly approaching the Tarkin Moment of maximum hubris. With a banking system this weak, the EU can ill-afford to squeeze its people any harder.

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