Twenty-five years after its launch, the eurozone is failing its citizens. In Spain, the unemployment rate sits at 10.29 percent. In Greece, 26.9 percent of people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Meanwhile, Italy’s public debt has climbed to 137.9 percent of GDP, the second highest in the euro area after Greece. The eurozone has failed to deliver the prosperity it once promised to Europe. These stark figures underscore the grim reality: for millions, the system isn’t lifting them up but pulling them under.
The Euro’s Promise and Its Built-In Weaknesses
The eurozone was launched in 1999 with the goal of creating a stronger and more unified European economy. By adopting a common currency, the euro, member states hoped to eliminate exchange rate volatility, boost trade, and increase Europe’s weight in the global financial system. The project was also deeply political: an attempt to unite national economies to prevent future conflict and promote integration. Yet, the shared monetary policy under the European Central Bank allowed for very limited fiscal and political coordination. This meant that while countries gave up control of their own currencies, they did not gain the compensating protections of a common budget, shared taxation, or automatic fiscal transfers. As a result, when weaker economies faced crises like the 2008 recession, they had few tools to recover. Instead, they were pushed into painful austerity, often slowed further by European Union (EU) bureaucracy.
Core Winners, Peripheral Losers
The flaws in the eurozone’s design have produced sharp economic divides. Wealthier core economies such as Germany and the Netherlands have reaped significant benefits from the euro, enjoying persistent export surpluses and access to cheap credit. By contrast, southern, peripheral states such as Greece, Spain, and Italy have struggled under heavy debt, weak growth, and chronic unemployment. Without the ability to devalue their own currencies, these states cannot restore competitiveness during downturns. Instead, they are pushed toward austerity measures — cutting social benefits for the elderly or raising taxes on the working class — that deepen poverty and social unrest. The importance of devaluation as an adjustment tool is clear in the British case. After the pound was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, the weaker currency helped British exports recover and supported a broader return to growth and falling unemployment in the mid-1990s.
An Italian exchange student at UC Berkeley from the University of Bologna, who wishes to remain anonymous, reflects on his own experience living within the structure of the eurozone. He explains that “almost all” of his classmates plan to leave Italy after their bachelor’s degrees because they see no future in the domestic job market. The Italian National Institute of Statistics confirms this brain drain: in 2022, one in three Italian emigrants was between 25 and 34 years old, and nearly 18,000 of them already held at least a bachelor’s degree, while earlier estimates suggest that in some years 3 to 5 percent of new Italian graduates move abroad annually. He also reports that under the current model, “the bigger economies in the EU get to bully the smaller ones,” a sentiment also shared by 75 percent of Italians in polling.
Meloni’s Italian Doctrine: “Do Less but Better”
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has quickly risen as a central figure in the European Union. Once known as a Eurosceptic who questioned the legitimacy of Brussels’ power, she has now positioned herself as a pragmatic reformer who seeks to reshape the EU. Her new philosophy of “fare meno, ma meglio” — “do less but better” — captures this shift. Instead of endlessly expanding EU competencies into every policy area, Meloni argues that the Union should concentrate its energy and resources on targeted reforms that matter most for bringing prosperity to Europe — such as fiscal solidarity, energy security, and financial stability — while rejecting the idea of a European “superstate.” In doing so, Meloni’s approach acknowledges the eurozone’s structural flaws, while offering a politically feasible solution: deeper, smarter integration where it’s most impactful. For states more dependent on EU funding, such as Italy, Spain, and Greece — where GDP per capita, employment, and human-development indicators consistently lag behind core economies — this could mean a system that provides genuine support rather than one-size-fits-all austerity. For more economically independent states within the Union, such as Germany and the Netherlands, it offers a framework that strengthens the eurozone without overburdening them with unrealistic demands. Meloni’s “do less but better” approach offers the clearest way forward, balancing unity and fairness so the eurozone can endure and prosper in the years ahead.
Reforming the Eurozone, Not Abandoning It
The eurozone was created to unify Europe’s economies, but its structural flaws have left many countries stuck in long-term debt and weak growth. Spain’s high unemployment rates, Greece’s entrenched poverty, and Italy’s overwhelming debt show that the system has failed to deliver on its promise of shared prosperity. Yet, dismantling the euro is neither realistic nor desirable.
Unwinding a common currency after more than two decades would mean redenominating trillions of euros in contracts and savings and could trigger a full-scale financial crisis, from bank runs to speculative attacks on weaker states. It would also shatter one of the EU’s core political achievements: the sense that Europeans share a common economic future.
The path forward lies in political and economic reform that strengthens integration, and Giorgia Meloni’s call to “do less but better” offers the most effective vision. By focusing integration on the areas where it can cut bureaucracy and tangibly improve people’s lives — fiscal support, energy, banking, and social stability — the EU can build a system that is more equitable for economically dependent states and more sustainable for stronger ones. For Meloni, integration means creating a stronger common fiscal capacity. A permanent eurozone budget can stabilize downturns and fund shared investments in green energy and social protection. Instead of constantly adding new policy fields and symbolic initiatives, her government backs reforms that concentrate resources in a few core tools: automatic fiscal support for countries in crisis and targeted investment programs that bring down energy costs and strengthen welfare states. In practice, Meloni proposes ideas such as greater EU fiscal flexibility, common borrowing for defense and competitiveness, and a stronger EU role in Mediterranean, energy, and migration policy. In this sense, less is truly more: fewer scattered projects, but stronger instruments that restore something people can actually feel — steady work, dignified wages, and the relief of a bill they can finally afford to pay.
Featured Image Source: The New York Times
