Southern Europe is reforming itself

THE ACRONYM stuck for a decade, no matter how bitterly the countries it lumped together moaned about it. Being branded one of the PIGS—short for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain—as the euro teetered was to be the perennial butt of bond-market bullying, Eurocrat nagging and German tabloid contempt. But look today and the bloc’s Mediterranean fringe is doing rather well. Those once stuck in the muck in the aftermath of the global financial crisis are now flying high. Southern Europeans are running their countries with the competence and reformist zeal all too often lacking in their northern neighbours. It may be a flash in the pan. But if it endures, it will come to change the nature of the EU.