In less febrile times the failure of Italy to pass a series of modernising political reforms would not be a trigger for potential panic in the markets or predictions of a wider unravelling of the European project.

Italy, after all, has had 63 governments since 1945. Nor, by the same token, would the election of a far-Right candidate to the presidency of Austria, given the largely ceremonial nature of the office.

But these are transparently not ordinary times: in the era of Brexit and President Donald J. Trump there is now a clear sense that the political sands are shifting in Western liberal democracies whose resilience has been sapped by a decade of economic impasse.