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If there was one soundbite, in Europe, in the last decade on which history turned, this was it. After a confusing preamble about a bumblebee that shouldn’t be able to fly, Draghi stopped reading from his script and, for 16 seconds, looked into the camera. “Within our mandate, within our mandate … the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the Euro.” He paused, adding, just to make sure: “Believe me, it will be enough.” Within minutes, the news hit the wires; billions shorting the Euro began to move in the opposite direction.

Mario Draghi is now Italian prime minister. The man who “saved the Euro” has been summoned from retirement to “save Italy” from the pandemic. There is a Europe of the mind: of Beethoven, summer holidays and the smell of coffee. Then there is Europe as it actually functions today — the Europe of Mario Draghi. A creature of the EU, understand him and you understand how to make friends in Brussels; how to win the most important battles; and how to be, among 27 countries, really European. But, above all, understand Draghi and you understand how power works in the EU. He has built a technocratic Europe and risen to its heights. 

Draghi was made in Rome. Not the city of old men it is today but the Rome of Fellini, Red Brigade attacks and the Italian miracle: an emerging market in Europe, running hot with labour unrest, a communist surge and the joy of youth. But whilst his generation was wild, flirting with extremism and dreaming of new worlds on campus, Draghi was tame and burdened by responsibility. An outsider in May ’68. 

It was his schooldays, not his university, that those who know him best say made him who he is

“My hair was quite long,” he told Die Zeit, “but not very long. And, that aside, I did not have parents against whom I might have rebelled.” His father, the well connected, geriatric banker, Carlo Draghi, born in 1895, had died when he was 15. His mother went into swift decline soon after. At 16, he returned from holiday to find a pile of unpaid bills waiting for him. Draghi was an orphan at 19.

Friends remember how a poised exterior concealed real angst. Maurizio Franzini, an economist, once shared an office with him; “He said, ‘I don’t look anxious. But I’m really anxious’.” When it came to university, haunted by discussions with his father and one of his earliest memories, a train ride with the governor of the Bank of Italy, Draghi chose economics at La Sapienza in Rome. But it was his schooldays, not his university, that those who know him best say made him who he is.

“He was well trained by the Jesuits,” said Vincenzo Visco, who worked hand in glove with him as Italian finance and then treasury minister. “They taught him to be prudent, reserved and to listen. He’s a social Catholic.” Mentioning the Jesuits has multiple meanings for Italians. It is a class marker that inexorably ties him to Massimiliano Massimo, the Jesuits’ Roman Eton, where Draghi studied with the sons of ministers and tycoons. It is the sign of a severe, rigorous education at the hands of scholar-priests; and it is privilege. For Europeans, it is often a way to draw attention to his manner: pedagogic; precise, shadowy and, if necessary, ruthless.

Herman Van Rompuy, the haiku-writing former President of the European Council, found it amusing. More than once, on the worst nights of the Euro crisis, surveying a table of Mario Monti and Mariano Rajoy, then Italian and Spanish premiers, sitting by Draghi, the former Belgian premier would joke, “We are good Jesuit students here, trying to find a compromise.”

Draghi had counselled the prime minister to proceed with a currency union, something he previously described as “madness”

But like any good joke, it hinted at something serious: that these men who emerged from a secretive fraternity founded to save the church were now serving Europe. “Maybe you don’t know,” said Mario Tiberi, an old colleague from academia, “that the Jesuits have a mantra from their founding Saint Ignatius of Loyola about serving the vision of God: todo modo, which in English means ‘whatever it takes’.”

As a wave of political killings followed ’68, Draghi learned the first lesson of political life. Always find the right mentor. His name was Federico Caffè. Amidst the clamour he lived, his students said, “like a monk”. Caffè was influential: Italy’s great Keynesian economist. Convinced Draghi was brilliant, he introduced him to Franco Modigliani, the Italian economist at MIT, who accepted him as a student. But he still had to complete his thesis. “It was on the single currency and I concluded that the single currency was madness, something absolutely not to do,” said Draghi, at an event honouring his mentor. 

Those who would shape the economic discourse of the age taught Draghi at MIT. He proudly points out that five of his professors won Nobel Prizes — Paul Samuelson, Bob Solow, Franco Modigliani, Peter Diamond, and Robert Engle. His peers — Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Kenneth Rogoff, Olivier Blanchard — would become high priests of the Federal Reserve, New York Times, austerity and the IMF respectively. As the new world of floating exchange rates, free flowing capital and empowered central bankers was starting to emerge, a circle of economists was coalescing. Together they shaped the neoliberal age.

Draghi was not looking for dogma. Unlike his mentors, Draghi’s economics has never set into a theory but has kept moving, always one point to the left from wherever the centre is. He sees it as pragmatism. By forty, he had disappointed the left wing Caffè. Draghi was now a Director at the World Bank. In April 1987, overtaken with grief that neoliberalism has triumphed over the left in economics, his disciples dead or fading, Caffè, the great Keynesian, disappeared. He was never seen again. Some say he committed suicide; others that he had taken himself to a monastery in the Alps, to hide from the world he saw coming. 

In February 1992, Draghi is in the room at Maastricht when the Euro begins: a key counsel to the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, when he signs the treaty. He has long left Caffè, the left and his thesis behind. The mood is ebullient; the popularity and success of the new EU’s single currency will sweep all before it. So much so that at the press conference, Helmut Kohl bets six bottles of German wine that Britain will join the project by 1997. “The government always does what the City wants,” he booms. “The City will ensure that Britain joins monetary union.”

Across continents, his former student peers were rising and rising. As economists they believed in intervention

The British departed with an “opt-out”; the Italians with conditions so tough the Germans were surprised they agreed to them. Draghi’s second mentor, Modigliani, was outraged. The decision to sign was Draghi’s: he was one of two Italians with ultimate authority on assessing the terms. He had counselled the prime minister to proceed with what in his thesis he called “madness”: a currency union without a political and economic union. Why? The answer: his neoliberal theory of Italian politics.

Midday in Rome. Sometime in the 1990s. a city of politics, alleys and corridors. Bells ring in the Senate. Matters are adjourned in the Palazzo Montecitorio. Suits disperse. Reporters shout questions. The whole torrent of activity seems to spill out and invade the streets around Piazza Navona. Negotiations continue under the umbrellas at Giolitti’s gelato. Civil servants meet ministers in the Hotel Forum. This is Draghi’s natural habitat. Heading the Treasury from 1991; it was here that the fortysomething civil servant did whatever it took to join the single currency: regulating Italy’s banks, managing its debt and privatizing over €100bn. Draghi was more than indispensable. He built Italian neoliberalism.

There was no better school than Rome for Euro politics: it was already a game of weak politicians and powerful technocrats. An abstract Italian painting hung over his desk at the Palazzo delle Finanze. Outside, “the first Republic” was falling apart. Exposed as a clientelist mess of mafia connections and kickbacks, all four parties in the ousted 1992 government would disappear.

Holding the country together was the strongest bureaucracy Italy had: the financial engineers in the civil service under the country’s first technocratic prime minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Draghi was in his element. Capitalism, he believed, had rules. As long as the politicians got out of the way and the technocrats set the right structure, stable growth would follow. This was the MIT philosophy. Across continents, his former student peers were rising and rising. As economists they believed in intervention: to help make the market function.

De Benedetti soon realized Draghi was a sphinx. Secretive. Astute. He never gave anything away

This was why the Euro was imperative. Capitalism could provide the rules — and the structure — that Italy lacked. Politicians would now be curtailed in macroeconomic policy. Signing up to a single currency put the fundamental levers of the macroeconomy — key fiscal and monetary policies — beyond domestic politics. This strategy was known as il vincolo esterno, the external bind.

Italy was doing so well. Its economy was larger than Britain’s; living standards were closing in on Germany. The early nineties was Italy’s moment: Tuscan wine displacing French in the US. Gucci and Prada were conquering the world. The tycoons wouldn’t risk this. They wanted help. By 1992, the young Draghi had caught the eye of one of Italy’s richest men, Carlo De Benedetti, then owner of both La Repubblica, L’Espresso and a slew of regional newspapers. They would meet often and discuss the Euro. “If Italy had not been part of the Eurozone, it would have been like Egypt or North Africa,” De Benedetti recalled. This is what elites feared in the 1990s: without il vincolo, a return to the 1970s. 

But De Benedetti soon realized Draghi was a sphinx. Secretive. Astute. He never gave anything away. But what did he want from him? “Once I asked him: I benefit from our conversations. But what do you get out of them?” Draghi smiled, “He said he liked to talk to someone from real life.” De Benedetti was right to ask. Because Rome had already taught Draghi important lessons. Never let anyone know what you’re thinking unless you have to. And always, always make the right friends: among the media and tycoons. One day, you will need their favours. 

Draghi’s political touch had not gone unnoticed. In parliament, he was often called “Mr. Britannia”, because of his endless meetings with London bankers. Salvatore Biasco, then a left wing lawmaker, from his committee watched Draghi slowly arrive at what would be his greatest realization: you can exert most power as a technocrat. “He behaved like a minister of the Treasury and not a civil servant,” recalled Biasco. “He was a sort of shadow Treasury minister.” Here, as an unelected politician, was where he honed the technocratic Draghipolitik that would shape Europe. 

Draghi’s generation believed they had got it all right. Then 2008 hit

All stories about European money end up in London. In 2002, Draghi became vice president of Goldman Sachs International. The friends, the seminars, the tycoons: it had all paid off. So, it appeared, had his strategy. A populist, Silvio Berlusconi, had become prime minister again in 2001. But so what? He was boxed in by il vincolo: his hands far from the real levers of power. Rome’s financial engineers were relaxed. Italy had not been profligate: it had run up a large national debt in the 1980s due to high interests it had imposed largely to bring inflation down to keep pace with the European monetary system that preceded the Euro. The coming boom would surely erode it.

Draghi’s generation believed they had got it all right. Then 2008 hit. The financial crisis revealed these engineers had made a terrible mistake. They had broken a system they would now spend the rest of their careers trying to fix. 

This would transform central bankers from the technocratic rule setters of capitalism into the political crisis managers who guided it — and in so doing reorder power in the EU forever. 

Dumb luck would give Draghi his chance to join these new supermen. First a corruption scandal opened up a vacancy for governor of the Bank of Italy. Then, refusing to countenance unorthodox ECB monetary policy to fight the crisis, the head of the Bundesbank long expected to succeed France’s Jean-Claude Trichet, resigned. With Berlin now without a candidate, the ECB prize opened up to another big state’s central banker.

Media management would ensure that Draghi got it in June 2011. The German media hated the idea of an Italian in the Eurotower. Angela Merkel was hesitating. De Benedetti received a call: the bill for the breakfasts was finally in. The normally suave Mario, he said, was hysterical. “He had become mad,” De Benedetti remembered. Bild had run a cover story about Italy. “Mamma Mia,” it read. “For Italians, inflation is a way of life, like tomato sauce with spaghetti.” “He called me and said, ‘What can you do for me?’” remembers De Benedetti, “He was concerned it was harming his image.” A meeting with the tabloid’s owner was arranged. A glowing portrait followed with a front page of Draghi accepting a spiked Prussian helmet from Bild. “Mario was always very thankful,” said De Benedetti. Cultivating his technocratic image has from the start been core to Draghipoltik.

Draghi approached the top job politically. Again he got lucky. Jean-Claude Trichet had ended his mandate so badly that any successor would look good in comparison. In the words of the historian Adam Tooze, “On his way out of office, Trichet, by only backing austerity governments in the market, had helped Berlin to hardwire austerity into the circuit board of the EU.” It was bad economics: this led to consumption depression prolonging the recession. But Draghi would go further. In August 2011, he signed a secret letter to the Italian government: an austerity note urging cuts and labour reforms. Rome was horrified; Berlin was delighted. By signalling that Frankfurt was only prepared to put its liquidity behind a certain type of politics he opened the door to ousting Berlusconi. A technocratic government replaced him — which the fallen leader called an EU “coup”.

Mitterrand’s mistake enhanced German power. German exports boomed

Draghi’s circle continued to shape capitalism: Ben Bernanke was heading the Fed and Stanley Fischer was in charge of the Bank of Israel. In Frankfurt, Draghi would treat the Eurotower like the Treasury in Rome, boasting, “In every press conference since I became ECB President, I have ended the introductory statement with a call to accelerate structural reforms in Europe.” Central Bankers had crossed the line: no longer technocrats, they were now politicians.

Stepping inside the ECB in Frankfurt is like putting on noise cancelling headphones. Between the blue glass and the elevators, everything is suddenly hushed. But its air conditioned chill has seen some of Europe’s most high stakes meetings. Soon after he became a central banker, Maurizio Franzini, an old friend, asked Draghi how he was handling the anxiety of such a big job: “He said he was still taking cold showers every morning, a coping technique he had learnt in the United States.”

In Frankfurt, Draghi would master the three modes of European power: the charismatic — the politics of persuasion — with which he would claim power for his bank; the technical — the politics of rules — with which he would be the EU enforcer in Greece; and the analytical — the politics of numbers — with which he would win the battle to guide capital flows with quantitative easing. Together these would come together into Draghipolitik — with which he would move the German dial. His challenge was in the very design he agreed to.

François Mitterrand had made the Euro his price of unification. He forced Kohl to make good on vague commitments to a single currency. France wanted the Euro to restrict German power. Mitterrand said the Deutschmark was Germany’s “nuclear weapon”. He feared unless he had a say on German interest rates, Paris would forever be forced to shadow them. He was mistaken. It wasn’t the currency. It was German credit that was the nuclear weapon. Agreeing a single currency without a Eurobond, a safe asset all could draw on to finance themselves in times of trouble, meant German bonds became the Eurozone’s safe asset. Berlin now had a de facto veto over debt politics.

Mitterrand’s mistake enhanced German power. German exports boomed; the competitiveness of Italian exports declined, France’s stagnated. The Euro had made German goods cheaper than if they had been in Deutschemarks and Italian goods more expensive than they had been in Lira. Berlin could take on new debt with little risk. The rest were not so lucky. After 2008, weaker governments needed the Union to buy their bonds, bail them out and collectivize their debt. But Kohl agreed to the Euro on condition there would be no collective debt; that the ECB would not directly finance governments. Berlin had to be convinced. Euro politics became a game where everyone danced around Merkel trying to get her to turn on the taps. At this, Draghi was king.

The EU’s problem is not that it’s a superstate, it is that it’s not a state. A crisis had appeared which had a clear solution. But no central authority existed to implement it. From Podemos to Syriza, politicians were elected to build a fairer Eurozone. But their hands were far from the real levers of power. This is where Draghipolitik came into its own: the technocratic art of moving Berlin. Through this he made the ECB a real central bank and himself a player. First, Draghi used charismatic power to move Merkel and markets. According to Nicolas Véron, one of the leading researchers on the Euro crisis, Draghi played a historical role as “the chief pedagogue” who persuaded the Chancellor to agree to a banking union in 2012. “This is where Draghi excelled, said Van Rompuy. “He had great persuasive power: talking clearly, to the point and with natural authority.” He told Merkel: this is in the German interest and it’s the bare minimum you must do. That is the strength and the limits of Draghipolitk.

The errors made by the world’s elite central bankers made them more powerful than most politicians

This was just enough credibility to claim Berlin was behind the Eurozone. He then multiplied it. Watching Draghi say “whatever it takes” was like Hegel watching Napoléon at Jena. “It is indeed a wonderful sensation,” Hegel wrote, “to see such an individual, who, concentrated at a single point, astride a horse, who reaches out over the world and masters it.” 

But who was the horseman? Was it Draghi? Was it Merkel? Or was it the markets? According to the political philosopher Luuk van Middelaar, then Van Rompuy’s adviser, those sixteen seconds contain it all. “If you listen carefully; first there’s the technocratic. He says, ‘within our mandate’. Then, there’s the political, ‘whatever it takes’. And only then, there’s charismatic authority, ‘And believe me, it will be enough.’ And that’s what makes him the horseman.” The following day Hollande and Merkel confirmed. He had opened the way for the ECB to backstop sovereign debt markets. His charismatic authority had convinced traders that power lay behind the Euro: using the bare minimum.

As Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis encountered yet another of Draghi’s political qualities: ruthlessness. Seen from Frankfurt, a Greek default followed by a European banking collapse loomed unless it could get a hold of the situation. When Athens tried to push more of the hit onto creditors, putting the bailout to a vote in 2015, Draghi signalled he would stop emergency loan assistance to its banks. “The free-for-all against us was led by Mario Draghi,” Varoufakis recalled in his memoir. This was the EU politics of rules at its most brutal. But by punishing the EU’s most profligate states with austerity bailouts, he won trust in Berlin to further Draghipolitik. 

Finally, Draghi mastered analytical power: that is the politics of numbers. On powerpoint in the Governing Council, Giuseppe Ragusa, a former ECB senior economist, watched him overcome the frugal Bundesbank to launch quantitative easing in 2014. “The way he was able to convince people to do what he did,” said Ragusa, “was by moving the political debate from politics to actual numbers.” 

These meetings again changed European capitalism. Genuinely free markets, which had opened in the 1970s with the lifting of capital controls, closed. Directed capitalism came to Europe with the ECB incentivising markets to buy riskier assets by buying over $2.8 trillion safer ones by 2018. It was the ultimate act of intervention without redistribution. Draghi was convinced the Euro would not survive deflation and a third recession without it. But his mistakes had worsened the very problem he was trying to solve with austerity prolonging the pain in the south.

Italy has gone from the country of the Red Brigades to a country for old men

A whisperer, an enforcer, a number cruncher. These are not the qualities one expects of a great man. But that is to misunderstand how the EU works. Its machine was built to depoliticise politics; and those who do that best, thrive; the unassuming bureaucrat becomes Napoléon. Through Merkel, the media and data, Draghipolitik overcame Jens Weidmann, the head of the Bundesbank. “Draghi considered Weidmann his personal enemy,” said De Benedetti. It was mostly an icy affair. But once at dinner, said Salvatore Bragantini, a friend, his wife Maria Serenella Cappello, let this slip into the open: “‘So you are my husband’s enemy,’ she said, taking him aback.” 

As the crisis made the state more dependent on finance; finance become more dependent on the state. And men like Draghi were central to it. These victories reveal enormous skill. They turned the ECB into an even more powerful institution than the Bank of England. But they also underline how badly his generation got it wrong. They had bet on a half-built house for Europe as the key to stability. But a monetary union without a fiscal union brought instability. They had bet on setting neoliberal rules for capitalism and stepping back: and it had blown up. They had bet on austerity: then faced a depression. These errors made them — the world’s elite central bankers who then had to fix it all — more powerful than most politicians. 

In his brief retirement, after 2019, Draghi spent much of his time on the phone. He called presidents past or present: Bill Clinton, Emmanuel Macron. Or the other supermen who led central banks in the crisis: Ben Bernanke, formerly of the Fed; Mark Carney, previously of the Bank of England, or Stanley Fischer, who led the Bank of Israel. “He is the only man in Italy who can call anyone in the world,” said De Benedetti. He has built his career through networks. And his wealth: the home in Rome, one in Umbria, one on the Lazio coast and a new villa in Veneto.

All through life, Draghi’s personal and political bets have paid off. But at the same time, his great bet, the one he took with Italy — il vincolo esterno — has failed. The geopolitics failed: it has not helped manage German power. The economics failed: Italy has maintained one of the toughest fiscal regimes in Europe, running a primary surplus almost every year since 1995. Yet Italy has got poorer. In 2000, its average standard of living was 98.6 per cent of that of Germany. Today, Italian per capita income is 20 per cent below those over the Alps. These are the long term consequences of austerity, bottled reform and the Euro making exports uncompetitive. The debt Italy ran up in the 1980s has become its albatross. Draghi’s growth never came. 

And in its very success, the politics failed. Populist politicians and coalitions flirting with exit were unable to escape Draghi’s order. But Italy has been trapped in a loop of increasingly weak populists, punctuated by weak technocrats. Both have failed on their own terms. With growth-starting macroeconomics out of their hands, the politicians in Rome seize on identity politics, not reform. Growth is stifled. Government is feeble. What Italy needed was strong leaders after all. 

Tellingly, Macron’s success only came when he embraced Draghipolitik

Italy has gone from the country of the Red Brigades to a country for old men. Italian industry, Italian football and Italian cinema have all gone into decline. A generation of Italy’s most ambitious have once again emigrated. In 2010, the cult TV show Boris, captured the sour mood. “This is the future of Italy,” says a script director in a now iconic line. “A country of merry jingles, whilst outside there’s only death.” 

At the start of the pandemic the same story started happening again. But this time, Macron convinced Merkel to shift on her deepest redlines — collective EU debt. Germany consented to a one-off €750 billion of Covid loans and recovery grants. Tellingly, Macron’s success only came when he stopped being more like Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis, with speeches at the Sorbonne emphasizing his mandate, and embraced Draghipolitik to move Berlin. It was a decisive breakthrough in the manoeuvres against the frugal Europe that Draghi had begun. 

But Italy is not only a country for old men: it is the country, it seems, for the same men. One last time, he was ready when another man made a mistake. “Since he left the ECB, Draghi’s ghost was hovering over Italy,” said one source. “It was after the corona fund deal that he became interested in a political return.” 

Phone calls to the president; phone calls to Renzi; phone calls to Berlusconi; when the government of Giuseppe Conte imploded; Draghi had a pitch. He would be a technocratic prime minister: but with a twist — a mostly political cabinet bringing in all parties but the furthest Right. He was offering himself as a solution to the very problem il vincolo esterno had fuelled: weak politicians unable to lead. 

“The truth,” said the historian Marcel Gauchet, “is that Europeans do not know what they have built.” This is what the struggles of Draghi reveal. As Europeans, his generation has built a halfway house for Italy. The Euro means they cannot go back to national models of economic management, devaluation and default. But the road forward: to a debt relief, transfers and fiscal union, is blocked too. Stuck, the politics of mandates won’t work: the only politics that seems to, is Draghipolitik.

Rising in a face mask in the Italian parliament, the non-party technocrat — but the master of politics — surveyed his six-party coalition stretching from the right-wing populists of the League to the left leaning moderates of the Democratic party. He also saw his historical chance. Nobody knows better than him, the real politics of Europe is the politics of Eurozone debt. 

Draghi needs to do the opposite of what he first set out to do and foster a new generation of strong politicians to succeed him

This is why Brussels and Paris are now watching Draghi. Can he successfully invest Italy’s €200 billion from the Covid fund? “The prime minister sees his economic mission like this,” said a senior Italian official. “He is seeking to demonstrate how the new joint debt of the corona fund can reboot Italian growth. Draghi has made the case for a strong fiscal backstop to address future risks in the euro area.” Spending the money wisely is his route to make the fund that permanent backstop. If he can keep his coalition together, Draghi can govern in this way until the next scheduled election in 2023. At which point, he is expected to aim for the presidency. “This has long been the role he would have preferred,” said one source.

A Euro collapse is now unlikely. That is his legacy. The risk that Europe faces now is that the Euro system — the unfinished house — slowly does to the EU as a whole what it has done to Italy, putting it on a permanently lower growth trajectory. The EU needs collectivised debt for more collective stimulus. But will Merkel’s heirs agree? With all the implications for sovereignty to what is ultimately — a transfer union? Until someone can pull off the next painful step of consolidation, the risk is that the Union continues to lose the battle for globalisation. Draghi shows what’s possible. 

But the price of Draghipolitik is this: it is consolidation without democracy. Empowered elites with alienated voters. Politics only men like him can play. Which, by weakening parties and the importance of elections, makes the only other way to get to a better Europe, a transnational, democratic movement for a fairer Eurozone, even less viable. Draghipolitik may offer a path to a technocratic solution but it exacerbates the political problem. 

Today he sits on the zeitgeist: promising to begin Italy’s exit from neoliberalism, his latest fiscal thinking lines up perfectly with Bidenomics. But it is not enough. He now needs to do the opposite of what he first set out to do: and foster a new generation of strong politicians to succeed him. Only that can break the cycle that is weakening Italy. 

Draghi is fond of quoting The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel of a Sicilian noble adjusting to life in a new Italy united by Cavour and Garibaldi. “Everything must change so that everything can remain the same,” is the ironic maxim quoted time and again. Yet by the end of the novel, a united Italy really has come.

But what is this Europe? This system, Draghi’s system, is one that has depoliticised itself in order to survive. That it has. But at the cost of no longer being able to distinguish between stability and stagnation. A system that can only do the bare minimum. Not whatever it takes.

Davide Lerner contributed reporting.