Why leave the EU, when you can shape it instead?

I N 2017, ANY voters who wanted to follow Britain out of the EU had options. In the run-up to elections that spring, Geert Wilders, a bizarrely coiffured advocate of “Nexit”, was level at the top of polls in the Netherlands. A few months later Marine Le Pen reached the second round of the French presidential election on a policy of taking the country out of the euro and the EU itself. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League, attacked Mario Draghi, then the boss of Europe’s central bank, as an “accomplice” to the “massacre” of Italy’s economy. The party dangled the prospect of Italy’s departure from the euro and even the EU itself.