Italy’s center-right coalition government is on a collision course with Brussels which has rejected its budget on the grounds that the planned higher spending breaks eurozone rules. Eurocrats claim it could derail the EU’s third largest economy, which carries a national debt burden in GDP terms, second only to that of Greece. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy premier and the real power in the government, has said defiantly that the move from Brussels “doesn’t change anything”.

What looks to be happening in Italy in some key respects already parallels events in Greece in 2015. There, the left-wing Syriza party of Alexis Tsipras won power with a mandate to reject a third EU bailout and further loans which it said would cripple the Greek economy for years and leave its citizens wallowing in the effects of a punitive recession.

In both Greece and now Italy, politicians won wide popular support to challenge the eurozone’s financial edicts. The then Greek finance minister, left-wing academic Yanis Varufakis, had been parachuted into the job from a teaching post in Texas. He argued that the original Greek bailout, funded by government loans of EU taxpayer’s money and overseen by the European Central Bank, was in fact designed to pay off French and German banks heavily exposed to Greece and facing bankruptcy if Athens chose to default. The money the EU therefore provided to Greece went in one door of the Greek central bank and out the other to settle Franco-German bank claims. Moreover, Brussels sent in a troika of bureaucrats with the power to regulate Greek finances and its deeply corrupt and largely inefficient tax collection.

The Italian government has not yet mirrored Greece by joining in a battle to restructure and write off part of its national debt, in part because that debt is still widely held by financial institutions around the world. It would first require an EU operation to stave off Italian bankruptcy by buying in much of that international debt before it could establish its Greek-style leverage. And Italy owes significantly more than Greece.

But if the coalition in Rome continues on its collision course, the EU will start to take financial reprisals. Moreover, if the showdown continues, it can be expected that Brussels, strongly backed by France’s Emanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel, will start to play hardball in the same way that it handled Varufakis’ stubborn insistence on carrying out his government’s popular mandate to reject a third bailout and renegotiate Greece’s debt to give its economy a reasonable chance of genuine recovery.

The issue in both cases is the electoral will versus the rules of Brussels, designed as these are to lead to ever greater European economic and political integration. Those rules have only ever been flexible if flouting them advances the vision of a single European state, as with the fudge that allowed France and Belgium to become founder members of the eurozone even though their state finances did not meet the criteria. As Greece found out to its cost - Varufakis was fired and Syriza was forced to accept a crippling third bailout - Italian voters are likely to have their views ignored. The economic price for Italy could prove high. However, the cost to European democracy and ultimately EU cohesion could turn out to be even higher.