Th e EU era has also given austerity hawks a window to advance institutional reforms that explicitly strike at the foundations of democratic principles— political guardrails that, especially in Italy, were formalized to mark a distance from the country's Fascist past. Similar to Fascist economists in the early 1920s, these contemporary fi gures advocate for electoral reforms to diminish proportional representation (and thus favor stronger governments) and to rewrite countries' constitutions to include an obligation to a balanced budget. Italy implemented both policies in the 2010s.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1589