A similar showdown had taken place in Spain earlier this year, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s partial obstruction of national lender BBVA’s move on the Catalan lender Sabadell to preserve support in Catalonia, a vital political constituency. Berlin, meanwhile, is also gearing up for a confrontation with UniCredit, which is seeking to take control of national champion Commerzbank.
On the one hand, this all reflects tension between the EU’s efforts to promote the creation of homegrown global banking heavyweights and the immediate national priorities of governments.
In Italy, for instance, the events were cast as an epochal struggle between free-market liberalism and resurgent protectionism, with the international, profit-hungry UniCredit — dubbed the banca apolide, or the “stateless bank” — cast as an embodiment of the increasing “financialization” of Italian banks that would occur under the EU’s competitiveness drive.
Officials griped that top-down calls to create banking behemoths were in conflict with the EU’s own slow pace in agreeing on policies — such as deposit insurance schemes and banking backstops — that would protect member states from the risks of cross-border monopolies.
“There is a growing disconnect between the rhetoric often heard at EU level … and the choices made by some member states when concrete merger operations are on the table,” said Judith Arnal, a senior research fellow at the Brussels-based CEPS think tank.
One Italian treasury official pointed to the irony that the Commission was itself pushing a protectionist agenda — with its renewed fixation on muscular bloc-wide industrial policy to preserve “strategic autonomy” — while rebuking protectionism at the national level, showing scant respect for the “sovereigntist” principles on which its own president, Ursula von der Leyen, cruised to her second term in office.
