For the few who missed it, Spain handily defeated Italy yesterday, proving Moody’s wrong once again and making us 1-0 on Euro cup calls here at The Mint.  The Spanish national team, which has won each Euro and World Cup since 2008, will now go down as one of the greatest national teams of all time.

The continent will now turn its weary eyes to the Olympic games, while those who can afford it prepare for their constitutionally guaranteed summer vacation (no kidding, the EU high court has held it as such).

Unfortunately for footballers and vacationers alike, Europe is operating in a perpetual crisis mode, and it is possible that vacationers will return to a Europe that is quite different than the one they left just 30 days before.  One in which their options are limited and their ATM card doesn’t work.

Yes, what started as a minor Hellenic financial problem has predictibly mushroomed into a political crisis at the highest level of the EU.  Voters, fed up with the bailout/austerity approach to banker welfare, increasingly exercise what is left of their sovereign right to vote out relative conservatives and/or moderates and vote in technocrats and/or populists as their fearless leaders.

Here is another prediction, for what its worth, the populists take Germany in the fall of 2013, Europe’s version of Mega Maid will have turned all the way from suck to blow.   The path of austerity that they are currently on will be but a faint memory as the ECB and policy makers move from bailing out the bankers to bailing out any and every political ally.

{Editor’s note:  A populist, for our purposes, is a socialist who no longer masquerades as a conservative or moderate, they are out of the closet, as it were.}

Yet for all the drama and human suffering that is unfolding, we can’t help but think that this is all simply a high priced publicity stunt to get the doomed Euro currency some air time.

For many of the European peoples, the Euro currency has served as nothing more than an unwanted crash course in math and an agent of larceny on the grandest of scales.  The average Jacque, Giorgos, Jorge, or Giovanni would have been better off in the long run had the Euro never been dreamed up.

However, the continued use of the Euro is an extremely high priority to for a select few with addreses on Wall Street, in The City, and anywhere in Germany.  As such, the current tack for the doomed Euroship is for it to be spoken of in the same context as climate change or terrorism, which invariably involves an increasingly illogical and alarmist rhetoric.

The question of whether or not something should be done is glossed over in favor of handing supreme power to a body who demands that something be done.  The only rhetoric that is allowed beyond fear mongering is a discussion of what the supreme power should do.

And so it is with the Euro.

There will be a number of elections over the coming months in the Eurozone, and not one of them will matter.  The tone in Europe is turning decidedly populist, as George Friedman eloquently describes in his recent Geopolitcal Weekly report via Stratfor:

The Futility of European Elections

The only question that remains is whether or not the ECB will accomodate the populist agenda with an accomodative monetary policy.

Our guess is that they will, for populism has never been bound by fiscal restraint.