"high unemployment, high youth unemployment, recessions, ..."
You fail to notice that no one of those are because of EU rules - exactly the other way round. Many of those countries created their own problems because of terrible governments, and would have had catastrophic collapses if outside the EU. Situations like those in Italy and Greece, for example, pre-date the Euro and often pre-date the whole EU as well.
The catastrophic situation in South Italy (the North is on par with Germany....), for example, is a 150 year long issue (and even more), which was never properly addressed and resolved because of abject political reasons. A huge amount of resources was simply wasted (accumulating huge debts and leading to high taxes) to keep "peasants" calm enough (and feed mafias), and ensure vote tanks to their "ruling class". Now that there are no longer much local money to waste, the situation became critical. Many politicians hope to keep on wasting resources to keep their comfortable position trying to use now other EU countries ones - especially Germany -, blaming the EU for everything (to distract from their own corruption and malfeasance) until it happens. It's the "leech approach". Mr. Renzi in his attempt to win his own Autumn referendum to strengthen his power in the years to come is a perfect example. Despite the critical situation, he's trying to *buy* consensus promising more subsidies and the like, attempting to finance them with more debt - while avoiding to cut wastes despite three "spending review" commissioners - whose results and advises were binned each time, they would have cut sources of political controlled privileges and votes.
Is the EU asking that? Not at all - just the personal lust for power of the actual prime minister. Who cares if Italy is in a dire situation, better to be king in hell that a serf in Paradise, wrote a British...
More or less the same happened in Greece, and with varying degrees, in other countries, where urgent reforms were never made because they have crippled the "businesses" of the political class and their friendly crooks.
The "imposed austerity" is just an attempt to stop some countries to sink the ship because of pure selfishness, after all the same reason Great Britain decided to leave the ship itself.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
