The leaders of the European Union no longer gather around a table to seek their famous negotiated agreements. Instead, each of the 27 heads of government looks suspiciously at their peers through a screen that shows a mosaic of distant capitals.
This is what COVID-19 has brought.
The great hopes that the crisis would promote the consolidation of the bloc to face a common challenge has given way to the reality of division: The pandemic has pitted member states against each other and many capitals against the EU itself, a distancing reflected in the virtual meetings now held by their leaders.
Heads of government argue about everything from health passports to boost tourism to conditions for receiving pandemic aid. And what is perhaps worse, some attack the very structures that the EU created to combat the pandemic. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz lamented last month how buying vaccines in the bloc had turned into a “bazaar” in which the poorest countries were left out while the rich roam free.
“Internal political cohesion and respect for European values continue to face challenges in different corners of the Union,” the Center for European Policy said in a study a year after the pandemic left China and hit Europe.
In some places political responsibilities have been claimed.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis sacked his Health Minister on Wednesday, the third he dismissed during the pandemic in one of the worst affected countries in Europe.
Slovakia’s government resigned last week due to a secret deal to buy the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was forced to resign over his handling of the economic consequences of the pandemic.
But overall, political destabilization in the EU has been moderate, considering that half a million people have died in the pandemic. At the community level there has not been a serious campaign calling for the removal of the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s top executive, despite her admission that serious mistakes were made.
It is clear that the EU has not risen to the occasion, which is not clear that it can. The Center for European Policy noted that “there is no immediate end in sight to the health crisis, not to mention the inevitable structural economic challenges.”
The EU and its members, of course, were victims of events beyond their control, like other countries around the world. Strong arguments can be made that some of the bloc’s problems are due to delivery delays from Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. But some of the crises were clearly self-inflicted.
The most common complaint is that there is no united health framework to address the pandemic and that health remains largely a national competence. But for years the bloc has had a common regulatory agency for drugs, the European Medicines Agency. And last summer it was decided to buy the vaccines together and distribute them equally among the 27 member states, rich and poor, large and small.
But as some non-EU countries took the lead with emergency vaccine authorizations, the EMP moved more slowly, at least in part because it followed a process very similar to the standard licensing procedure that any new vaccine would follow. The agency gave the green light to its first vaccine three weeks after Britain, which was the first country to authorize a COVID-19 vaccine after rigorous testing.
The block never closed that distance. Britain had administered at least one dose to 46.85% of its population on Friday, compared with 14.18% in the EU.
The European Union also made the mistake of equating obtaining vaccines with putting them in the arm of citizens, and underestimated the difficulties of mass production and distribution of such a delicate product. While EU negotiators focused on liability clauses in contracts, other countries focused on logistics, betting on volume and speed.
And while countries like the United States closed their borders to vaccine exports, the EU opted for moral superiority and kept exports going, to the point that in the first quarter of the year, almost as many doses were sent to third countries as the that reached the member states.
In addition to the lapses in vaccine rollout, the EU will be slow to deliver the money from the 750 billion euro ($ 890 billion) rescue package, which will combine debt-sharing and grants to poorer countries in an unprecedented program. But disputes between governments over some clauses and complex rules have made it anything but quick. What’s worse, the German constitutional court could still further slow down or delay the entire initiative.
The nature of the crisis may be different from past ones, but new obstacles have appeared: exhausting bureaucracy, unnecessary delays, and technical and legal disputes that overshadowed the global vision, as well as politicians who put their personal interest ahead of the common good. .
The last week serves as an example. The WEA reiterated its advice that all member states follow the same criteria, this time to continue AstraZeneca vaccinations for all adults despite a possible link to very rare cases of blood clots.
Instead, hours after the announcement, Belgium went against that recommendation, banning the AstraZeneca vaccine for patients 55 and younger, while other countries issued or maintained similar restrictions.
“If government leaders don’t trust science, trust in vaccination disappears. If we don’t rely on the (EMP), ANY common EU strategy is doomed, ”said prominent European MP Guy Verhofstadt, who is often one of the EU’s strongest advocates.
It is noteworthy that the member states insisted on delaying their vaccination campaigns in December specifically because they wanted to wait for the WEA’s decision. But since then many have repeatedly ignored the agency’s recommendations and imposed more restrictions on the vaccine than the agency indicates.
The great qualms of many countries – in addition to the often contradictory advice – have become a hallmark of a truncated vaccination campaign. It has also exacerbated supply and confidence issues on the block.
Just over half of the doses that the EU had contracted for the first quarter of the year -105 million instead of 195 million- have been delivered and at the videoconference summit last month, the different countries discussed the doses and the a distribution system that few saw unfair.
Now there are expectations that the EU can redirect the situation. The block is confident of receiving 360 million doses this quarter, which would keep alive the promise to vaccinate 70% of adults by the end of the summer in the 450 million-population block.
French President Emmanuel Macron gave millions of people a glimmer of hope when he said that perhaps something like normal life could return by mid-May, when people could “take back our lifestyle, embodied in our restaurants and our coffee shops that we love so much ”.
By then, EU leaders may even be able to meet again in person at all-night summits.
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