The Italian joker - Telegraph European leaders have been patting themselves on the back with increasing vigour in recent months over their success in saving the euro. The promise by Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, to drain the coffers dry before letting the single currency fail appeared to have stabilised the situation, or at least to have bought some time. Events in Italy, however, show the extent to which such hopes are built on sand rather than rock. In the run-up to the country's election, which concludes today, it was widely expected that the centre-Left party, led by Pier Luigi Bersani, would form a coalition with the centrist grouping run by Mario Monti, the technocrat parachuted in to replace Silvio Berlusconi when Europe's leaders tired of his political and fiscal indiscipline. Despite some grumbling, and some populist gestures, enough of Mr Monti's programme of austerity and structural reform would be retained to satisfy the markets, and the country's paymasters. How shocking, and unnerving, for those in Brussels to see the Five Star Movement, a band of novices led by the outspoken comedian Beppe Grillo, seize the initiative on an anti-politics and anti-euro ticket. Thanks to a moratorium on opinion polling, nobody knows whether this guerrilla army will maintain its momentum, or even whether it will hold together after the election. But its success shows that a generation failed by the system - in the shape of sky-high unemployment and debt - is not willing to play along with politics as usual. It is not just Italy: look at events in Spain, or Greece. The national crises that threw the eurozone into turmoil have not gone away; the setting has been turned down to simmer rather than boil. All it will take is one election, or one government caving in to protest, and the heat will be back on.