Coronavirus pushes Europe to the edge
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the deaths and economic damage from Covid-19 continue to rise, Italians are asking why the EU is doing so little to help in their time of need.
The pandemic is reinfecting old wounds in the EU, reopening the divide between the wealthy north and the heavily indebted south. In Italy angry citizens have taken to burning the EU flag in viral YouTube clips (pictured). There are calls for "coronabonds" to finance a rescue package for the hardest hit nations, but Germany and the Netherlands remain reticent.
Business Daily's Manuela Saragosa - herself half-Italian, half-Dutch - asks journalist Antonello Guerrera of Italian newspaper La Repubblica, whether the country could turn its back on Europe. Dutch political economist Jerome Roos of the London School of Economics says the EU's future is at stake. We ask Clemens Fuest of the IFO German economics think tank whether Chancellor Angela Merkel is prepared to make an act of historic European solidarity.
Producer: Laurence Knight
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. In this edition, could the |
| 0:08.1 | coronavirus pandemic break up the European Union? We're at risk of falling back to sort of the default |
| 0:13.7 | pre-war position where it's everyone for their own. The type of beggar thy neighbor politics that we saw |
| 0:18.0 | in the 1930s would now become the kind of sickened thy neighbor |
| 0:20.8 | politics in the middle of a pandemic. We'll hear why some say this pandemic is putting the EU in |
| 0:25.6 | mortal danger. And we hear from those who disagree. |
| 0:29.3 | Claiming that if we don't introduce a certain type of bond, countries will leave the EU after the |
| 0:35.1 | crisis. I just don't think that that's plausible. |
| 0:37.9 | That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:45.1 | This week, the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte sat down for a live interview with a German television station. |
| 0:56.7 | He wasn't addressing the millions of Italians in lockdown in his own country. |
| 1:00.9 | Instead, flanked by the Italian flag and the EU one, he made a direct appeal to German citizens. |
| 1:07.2 | Help us, he said. Help us financially. |
| 1:11.8 | I'm going to take the opportunity to tell you all that we're not in the process of writing an |
| 1:16.1 | economic textbook here. We're writing a page in history. We're being called to manage a challenge |
| 1:22.9 | of epic proportions and to find a way out of this devastating emergency. |
| 1:35.0 | Mr Conte's appeal came after the EU's so-called frugal four, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria, |
| 1:40.9 | said no to what have become known as corona bonds. A quick explainer here. At the moment, |
| 1:45.8 | each EU member state issues its own debt on international markets in order to raise cash. |
| 1:55.1 | That means some less fiscally secure countries, like Italy or Spain, are paying higher interest rates than their more financially sturdy northern neighbours. |
| 2:03.1 | A corona bond would involve the EU issuing debt as a whole, effectively clubbing together on international markets. |
| 2:08.2 | A corona bond is basically a euro bond and it would give countries like Italy and Spain the economic and financial backing of Germany with its higher creditworthiness. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.