Eurozone watchers like me underestimated at first the willingness of the apparatchiks to keep the single currency going. Whilst good leadership might have been in short supply, a story has emerged in the last year of striking resourcefulness in taking steps to defer the final Euro crunch. In retrospect this should have been obvious - a generation of European leaders has grown up believing in the The Project, and they are not going to see their dreams chucked on the scrap-heap just because of a yawning currency imbalance between north and south.
No leader has emerged with greater credit (admittedly in a below-average field) than Mario Draghi, ECB chief. First of all his Long Term Financing Operation, allowing banks access to cheap three-year money, kept the banking system afloat at a time when it might well have foundered. Now, when it looks as if Spain could get sucked into the abyss of unaffordable bond yields, up pops Draghi with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to keep yields down, a promise which has taken the concrete form of Outright Monetary Transaction, a scheme by which the ECB will buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market in exchange for fiscal reforms by the sovereign in question.
Draghi reminds me of Jan Tomaczewski, the legendary Polish goalkeeper, who flung himself in the way of the missiles bombarding his goal during World Cup qualifier against England in 1973. Like Tomaczewski, Draghi seems equal to everything that is thrown at him.
But his interventions are short-term only. Draghi is a good shot-stopper, but he cannot stop the relentless attacks on his goal. The country most likely to need OMT now seems to be Spain. But Spain doesn't want to ask for the money yet, because it would be politically humiliating and in October there will be regional elections. Meanwhile the country has youth unemployment at 50%, and yesterday Madrid cut 40 billion Euros from its budget (perhaps to forestall the demands the ECB will make for triggering OMT), which will only push its economy further into recession. And this at a time when Catalonia is pressing for a secession referendum which Madrid says would be illegal. Old Spanish generals are warning about military action if Catalonia goes ahead.
Thus even the most competent Eurozone leader's measures are made at the expense of ordinary people in countries of the southern periphery. They are anti-democratic in several senses. Draghi and his like have no democratic mandate in Spain. They aren't even Spanish. Their decisions profoundly affect the Spanish electorate, but Spanish voters have no say in them. Their effect on Spain as the country struggles to do what is required of it is so grindingly awful that it jeopardises not just Spanish democracy, barely half a century old, but the existence of the country in its current form.
That all this should be happening in pursuit of a monetary union that was meant to ensure a united and peaceful Europe is a bitter irony.
A prediction then - if a country leaves the Euro it won't be because EU leaders have run out of imaginative road. On the contrary, they will keep thinking of ways to kick the can on a bit further till hell freezes over. Instead it will happen because somewhere people decide that they have had enough. At this stage Spain looks the most likely candidate.
