Has Covid Rescued Europe?

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we look at the big changes in European politics during the crisis and ask who has managed to turn it around. Is Italy now a model for crisis management? Has there been a reorientation in German politics under Merkel? Can the EU rescue fund really rescue the European project? Plus we discuss the long-term implications of big state politics for the future of Europe. With Helen Thompson, Lucia Rubinelli and Hans Kundnani.

Talking Points:

Over the summer, life—including political life—in Italy resumed some normalcy.

There will be regional and local elections, as well as a constitutional referendum, at the end of September.
The government now seems to be on firmer ground. This has to do with the recovery fund, and the fact that the two main parties in the coalition have decided to run together.
The Five Star movement had previously said it would never run with another party. It is becoming a more establishment party.

Salvini’s comeback has slowed down.

Salvini has made several mistakes over COVID.
The League runs the region that suffered the most during the COVID crisis. The president of that region, who is close to Salvini, is now embroiled in a corruption scandal that has to do with the process of buying PPE.

Italy has stabilized the situation domestically by excluding those who are most radical about the euro and by getting ECB and wider EU external support for Italy’s debt.

In Germany, there is a sense that Merkel has moved quite radically on debt mutualization in the Eurozone.
But there’s some misunderstanding about what the recovery fund does: it doesn’t deal with the pre-2020 macro imbalances in the Eurozone.

During the negotiations in March, Conte was hard on the EU. But once it was negotiated, the tone switched completely.

The debate over the conditions of accepting money from the EU is almost completely focused on whether Italy should apply to the European Stability Mechanism.
This doesn’t seem to translate to the recovery fund, which is surprising.
Five Star can criticize Europe in one regard, while accepting everything else.
But unhappiness with conditionality always reasserts itself in Italian politics because of Italy’s debt position and Eurozone fiscal rules.

There is too much focus on Merkel.

Merkel has embodied a broad consensus in German politics that has existed for the last 15 years. She tends to go with the flow of German public opinion.
The shift in Germany that led to the recovery fund is an example of this: she shifted because she saw public opinion shifting.
The big questions are: who will be Merkel’s successor? And who will be the junior partner in the coalition that successor leads?

In both Italy and Germany, there appears to be a doubling down on grand coalition politics.

In Italy’s case, this has involved co-opting a previous anti-establishment party. In fact, Five Star is now the senior partner.
In Germany, it’s more about keeping out anti-establishment parties.

There is a danger that the EU constrains countries from making the kind of shift toward state intervention that European governments currently want to make due to COVID.

This could become a problem down the line.
If EU countries were unanimous about this shift, you could imagine a remaking of the EU, but the old divides will almost certainly come back.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Our most recent episode with Lucia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my name is David Runtzmann and this is Talking Politics. Today we're looking at two countries that we haven't discussed for a while, Italy and Germany.
0:13.0	They're both said at the moment to be having quite good Covid crises. Are they? And what does that mean for Europe?
0:22.0	Talking politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading magazine of Books and Ideas, where you can read elegant and expansive essays on every subject imaginable.
0:36.0	From Amir Strinovassan on pronouns to James Meek on the WHO, from Pancage Mischra on Anglo-America to Catherine Rundell on the Greenland Shark.
0:49.0	Get 12 issues in print and online. That's half a year of the LRB for just 12 pounds, with the URL lrb.me slash talk.
1:09.0	Joining Helen and me today we have Lucia Rubinelli, who is, I hope you don't mind me saying this, our regular Italian correspondent and Hans Kudnani from Chatham House where he's a senior fellow and he's written very widely about both German and European politics.
1:31.0	Lucia just tell us where you are. I am at the Garda Lake close to Verona. Nice, right? Yeah, it's quite nice. Even though today it's quite cloudy and there's a thunderstorm coming and I can see it from my window.
1:45.0	Just tell us when it hits. Hans are you in London? I am, I'm in West London, which is also very nice, but it's not quite Lake Garda.
1:53.0	I think, let's start with Italy. Lucia, we've had a few conversations and there's been a kind of arc to them. So I vividly remember our first one when you were locked down. This was in March.
2:07.0	And you seem to be in this terrifying situation. You were locked down in a flat and we weren't. And it was like this glimpse of the future and it was properly scary.
2:17.0	Italy seemed to be the sort of harbinger of doom, a glimpse of the thing that was coming for all of us. Then we spoke when the situation is more similar between the UK and Italy.
2:28.0	Now we're in the supposedly out phase, although we'll see what's coming next. And there seems to have been in the coverage from outside Italy, a big shift in perspective on how people view Italy's experience of the pandemic.
2:41.0	It was terrible. Then we were sort of all in it together. And now Italy seems to be doing pretty well. So this might be an illusion and it might just be how we cover these things.
2:52.0	It's a lot of it's pretty parochial. So in the UK there's this sort of sense of who's on the quarantine list and who isn't Spain is doing worse, France is doing worse.
3:01.0	But also there was an article in the New York Times saying Italy had started to become a kind of model for the world of how you can get out of this. Is it does it feel like that inside Italy is now a model for the world.
3:12.0	Well, I have to say that that article from the New York Times certainly contributed to boosting our national pride. There was a big debate when that article came out.
3:22.0	And I think it you know when it came out at a good time because it really looked like the summer was sorted and the cases were not too many and the situation seemed to be under control.
3:33.0	But since the article came out, cases have started rising again and quite an exponential rate. So just two days ago the government decreed a new series of restrictions, including the close down all nightclubs.
3:48.0	And now we have to wear masks everywhere. There are more than a few people gathered so the situation has improved substantially from our first conversation obviously and I have to say that for most of the summer so June and July.
4:03.0	Life seemed to be back to normal in Italy. So you go to a cafe and have your nice cappuccino outside and people would be chatting to each other and everything seemed normal. Now I think the trend is starting to change again.
4:19.0	And I bring in Hansen Helen in a second. We in our conversations you and I focused on the politics. In our initial conversation we also just focused on the experience of lockdown.
4:29.0	But there was a feeling both times that we spoke that this was really revealing these deep cracks in the structure of the Italian state.
	...

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