This essay compares two recent works on the relationship between capitalism and democracy: Tempo Guadagnato (W. Streeck) and Il colpo di stato di banche e governi (L. Gallino). While these books are similar in many ways, they differ in the analyses carried out and in the cultural and political proposals and evaluations. According to Streeck, the last fifty years have been marked by a series of compromises between capitalism and democracy that enabled capitalism to «gain time», that is, to find ways to amass huge profits during a long expansive phase, without seeming to weaken the democratic state and its assumptions, i.e. the welfare system. The inflationary escalation (spiral) and the subsequent states’ and citizens’ indebtedness represented the expedients used by capitalism to gain time and to construct two different peoples at the same time: the people of the voters —who comply with the dynamics of formal democracy— and the people of investors and savers, who comply with the dynamics of the financial markets. The European Union and the Eurozone in particular, became the political-institutional tool of international finance. Streeck’s solution therefore is to quit the Euro, renounce the goal of a politically- integrated Europe, and return to a mainly national dimension. Gallino identifies a more recent and radical break between capitalism and democracy, centered on the idea of a state coup orchestrated by financial institutions and governments against European citizens against the background of an economic neoliberalism that had become something more than merely a reigning ideology and has assumed a totalitarian form that is giving rise to a sort of anthropological change capable of persuading the victims of the neoliberal order that it is not only inevitable but just. According to Vitale, the comparison between Steeck and Gallino shows that the European political project rests upon foundations that grow shakier every day, especially if one believes that these foundations are the basis for constitutionalism and fundamental rights.