Mario Draghi – a man with no political ambition – has become Europe’s elder statesman

Mario Draghi, Italy’s 73-year-old reluctant prime minister, has been hailed as the savior of the EU from the follies and perils of its Covid vaccine crisis. He is credited with getting a new momentum behind vaccine production and the policies of the organisation – and to have succeeded in this where the EU Commission appeared to fail.

Draghi didn’t want to be prime minister – but was called by Italy’s president to form a cabinet of technocrats and politicians in February because the parliamentary system itself was on the point of collapse.

Italy’s own Covid epidemic was on the rampage. The roll out of vaccines had been sporadic, and varied hugely from region to region. Moreover, the disease had returned to the North and was again putting hospitals – among the best equipped in the world – under pressure. Patients and beds were jamming corridors as well as wards, and hard pressed staff were exhausted.

The economy was in trouble – as it had been before Covid arrived. At one point debt was measured at 160 per cent of national product. Most worrying is the chronic level of youth unemployment.

Cometh the hour, cometh the banker. Mario Draghi had enjoyed a successful spell as Governor of the Bank of Italy from 2006 to 2011, after which he became President of the European Central Bank, and was credited as the saviour of the Euro before stepping down in 2019.

At the ECB he showed he could manage Euro politics and intrigue at the highest level, say admirers, skillfully navigating the powerful German and French factions. The experience has served him well in Europe’s Covid crisis.

“Increasingly, he seems to be speaking for all of Europe,” wrote Jason Horowitz recently in the New York Times in a glowing account of Draghi’s first hundred days at the helm of the EU’s most difficult democracy.

In a dramatic move Draghi blocked the export of some 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccines from Italy to Australia. From there he encouraged the Commission to get its vaccine contracts and distribution regime in order. In a discussion of heads of government, he told the EU President Ursula von der Leyen that he found her forecasts for the vaccines “hardly reassuring.”

Draghi has stepped into what appears to have been a growing power vacuum at the head of the EU, according to Horowitz. A more accurate description would be an authority vacuum. Angela Merkel, with whom he is on very cordial personal terms, is due to leave power in October – and the Greens are already snapping at the heels of her CDU.

Emmanuel Macron seems increasingly to be preoccupied by internal problems – and the French operations in sub-Saharan Africa seem beset with difficulties. He is facing an awkward presidential election next year with Marine Le Pen’s nationalists moving into more central political ground. He, too, has forged an alliance with Draghi – so that some in Brussels refer to the ‘Dracron’ influence.

Not that everyone at EU headquarters loves him. Mario Draghi came to power on the pledge of spending wisely the €207 billion due to Italy from the EU Covid recovery fund. He has said he will add some €70 billion in Italian funding through treasury bonds to ensure a broad-based investment and development programme. But such are the Byzantine ways of eurocratic internal politics in Brussels that officials have said the Draghi development plans are lacking in detail and won’t meet the deadline of 30 April. 

Hints of this have been relayed by the Reuters and ANSA news agencies. “The Commission is unhappy with the Recovery Plan as it stands,” an anonymous official told Reuters. Another ‘source’ said Brussels wanted changes to Draghi’s plan.

Officials have told the agencies they are concerned about the vagueness over how the recovery would be implemented. One has expressed worries about reform of the justice sector. The Commission’s Vice President, Valdis Dombrovskis, stated that some EU states would miss the 30 April deadline, but refused to say which ones.

For its part, the Draghi team has said the plans will be ready on time and laid before the Rome parliament as a budget proposal by 28 April. It will meet the Brussels deadline of 30 April. An Italian diplomat, highly experienced to the wiles of EU Brussels, said “I think the old Franco-German axis is at work again. They  are worried about Draghi’s growing reputation.”

Draghi has been dexterous and decisive – especially in his handling of international relations. With a quirky, offbeat sense of humour and a habit of direct speaking, he is a master of mobile phone diplomacy. He phones Merkel and Macron directly on their mobiles. He has also spent a lot of time talking to Ursula von der Leyen – fully realising that he knows her less well than other leaders. He also consults his successor at the ECB, Christine Lagarde – but warned her to “curb your enthusiasm” when she started preaching closer fiscal union.

His first foreign visit, two weeks ago, was to Libya, where he encouraged the new interim government in its plans to move to a new assembly and to hold presidential elections in December. He was putting down a clear marker to allies like France not to go it alone and of Italy’s support for the UN, especially in the removal of foreign forces, including those sponsored by Russia and Turkey.

With Turkey, he has made no pretence at diplomatic nicety in denouncing the behaviour of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan towards Ursula von der Leyen. He allowed the EU High Representative to sit beside him on a chair on a dais, while forcing von der Leyen to sit on a banquette nearby. 

Draghi later said he was “very sorry for this humiliation.” He explained, “with these, and let’s call them what they are – dictators – with whom one nonetheless has to coordinate, one has to be frank when expressing different visions and opinions.”

Draghi is a new force in Italy and the European Union, but whether he can permanently moderate and change the course of politics and development for both is still a big, open question.

He has the huge advantages of having no obvious political ambition and being adroit at the personal and technical business of operating in politics at the very highest level. It could be argued that he is now EU Europe’s leading world figure. It makes an outlook not stuck on the tramlines between Berlin, Paris and Brussels really count in the counsels of the EU, and much of the EU machinery won’t like it.

“You have to realise Mario Draghi is European and he sees Italy’s future as within Europe,” my Italian diplomatic colleague explains. He may have a view of a more articulated Europe, a federation of nations, “but he is a deeply committed European nonetheless.”

For the moment Draghi seems to have set himself an 18-month term to get his recovery plan up and running until the autumn of next year. This is his focus – and he won’t even consider possible election as head of state next January.

The Draghi year and a half could be particularly interesting for the UK. Italy and Britain share the chair at the COP-26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in November. Both are ambitious for real achievement – so much so, that they are prepared to postpone for a year if Covid restrictions are still in place.

Draghi is by temperament a pragmatist and low key reformer – and while he may be a staunch European, there’s a bit of a Brit in his sense of irony and fun. His wife is an expert on English literature and he loves London. When he was contemplating going into private life after the Bank of Italy in 2011, he told a mutual friend that he hoped to spend a lot of time in London – “then I’ll be able to go to the theatre every night.”

For Boris Johnson, Draghi may be the best European to call on his mobile – he could no doubt crack a few jokes. But there would have to be a point; Super Mario doesn’t take prisoners.