“Last night was the darkest in the history of Italian democracy”, Luigi Di Maio, head of Italy’s populist Five Star Movement, said on Monday. For once, this was not just Italian hyperbole. He’s right, but not entirely for the reasons he meant.

It is indeed a profoundly threatening moment, not just for modern Italy, but for the European Union as a whole. Not because the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, has ridden rough-shod over democratic convention by blocking the appointment of a eurosceptic finance minister, or because he has turned to Carlo Cottarelli, a former big wig at the International Monetary Fund, to form a caretaker government; something similar has happened before in the bedlam of Italy’s political circus.

Rather, it is because the current, incendiary confluence of political, financial and economic forces is a much more dangerous mix than anything we have seen before in the single currency’s troubled, near twenty-year history, threatening to blow the whole thing apart from within.

It is impossible to imagine the euro, once the rebellious Italians have been cut loose, sailing on regardless as if nothing had happened.

If Berlin honestly believes this, then it is living in a parallel universe. The loss to creditor nations – of which Germany is by far the largest – would in itself set in train a whole sequence of political uprisings. And if it is the end of the eurozone, it is also curtains for the European Union.