The acronym was cruel enough. More than a decade ago, as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain fought to prove their creditworthiness to a doubtful world, the term “PIGS” caught on. But it was an innocuous-sounding phrase, “the periphery”, that really hurt, like calling Poland “eastern” Europe. (Or Hampstead a “suburb”.) For millennia, the Mediterranean world viewed most of what happened north of the Alps as incidental, if not barbarous. How stinging to have that condescension reversed.
A revenge of sorts is being had. Spain was the world’s best-performing rich nation in 2024, judged The Economist. Greece was borrowing as cheaply as France towards the end of the same year. Foreign delegations now trouble the political class in Athens for clues about how to do painful, fruitful reform. Portugal has been growing faster than Germany since before the pandemic.
Economic numbers will toggle up and down. What won’t change, I sense, is the gradual southward drift of political power in the continent. The only European head of government at Donald Trump’s inauguration was Giorgia Meloni. There is more to this than one woman’s opportunism, or the fact that Britain, France and Germany are led by wounded animals right now. After Brexit, space naturally opened up for another large nation to assert itself in the EU. Of the obvious candidates — Poland, Spain and Italy — two are Mediterranean.