Continental divides: covid-19 strains the EU

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The young president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, came to power last year as a social media-savvy force for change in the country's deadlocked politics. Since then, he's shown tendencies that may make him Latin America's first millennial dictator. And until recently, it would have been tricky to find Indonesians with a sunburn. Most people prize pale skin or don't expose it at all. But a false belief that sunlight can neutralize the coronavirus has people across the country soaking up the rays. First up, though, the European Commission would like to kickstart transport and tourism across the continent. On Wednesday, its vice president, Margrethe Vestager, recommended a gradual lifting of restrictions that had aimed to slow the spread of coronavirus.

We need carefully re-open borders within Europe. So we have adopted guidance for member states on a gradual, coordinated lifting of restrictions on the free movements in Europe.

But so far, that reopening is happening on a piecemeal basis. Today, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania opened their shared borders. Tomorrow, Germany will completely open its frontier with Luxembourg. Poland and the Czech Republic will keep their western borders closed until at least mid-June. This fractured reopening of Europe is something of a mirror on divides within the Union that the pandemic is making worse. A public health crisis has turned into an economic one and is fast becoming political, constitutional, possibly even existential. The hard-won ties across the continent are being stretched, threatening a project that started with a modest accord aimed only at peace.

Schuman is speaking. Correspondents know that this is a front-page story. L'Europe ne se fera pas d'un coup, ni dans une construction d'ensemble.

So the EU started life 70 years ago, as an idea of Robert Schuman, who was the French Foreign Minister in 1950, créant d'abord une solidarité de fait. who came up with the plan to mash together the coal and steel production facilities of West Germany and France, in the hope that this would make war between the two countries impossible.

Duncan Robinson is our Brussels bureau chief.

The following session of the assembly opens in an atmosphere of excitement. Symbolic of their desire to solve their nation's problems jointly, they are seated side by side together.

And so this agreement sort of evolved into the European Economic Community, and then it sort of slowly started to grow.

The government, Italian, Belgian, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, it started off with 6 members.

There's France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And it slowly grew. It took in more people, expanded to the north with Britain and Denmark and Ireland, then expanded to the south with sort of younger democracies joined with Spain and Portugal and Greece. And then by 60 or 70 years later, it was this behemoth. It was 28 countries. It was the world's biggest market. And in terms of making Europe peaceful again, it was an astonishing success.

But that's not to say that there hasn't been some disagreement about the project.

So the main problem with the EU as it stands is that it's a half-finished project. You have a common currency, but you don't have common spending. And you see this with migration, you have no border controls within the EU, but you don't have a common asylum policy. And that sort of comes to the fore, as we saw during the refugee crisis. And so what's happening is that because you have these gaps, annoyances and problems are really festering in them in a way that they don't with a normal state. And so it's a very sort of painstaking way of trying to fix them that the EU EU is currently involved in.

Problems that clearly have been exacerbated terribly by the pandemic.

Exactly. So what started as a health crisis became an economic crisis, then it became a political crisis, and then a financial crisis. And arguably, it's become a sort of constitutional crisis. So one of the first things that's been hit is the single market. Now, the single market is one of the EU's biggest successes. It means that you can trade freely wherever you like within the bloc. And one of the ways that it does that is by limiting how much help governments can give to domestic businesses. So that means that an Estonian company can compete with, say, a German one, even though the German government could potentially give them more money. So what normally happens is the German government's not allowed to hand out that cash in the form of what's called state aid. Now, in response to the pandemic, they paused all those rules on state aid, which means that right now, Germany is pouring astronomical amounts of cash into its domestic businesses to keep them going. And so they're having a relatively comfortable time of it. But other countries, whether they're less rich countries such as Spain and Italy, simply can't afford to do the same. So their businesses are really struggling. And in a market where countries can't protect themselves, where they can't take measures or put up tariffs or anything, that's a real problem. It makes it very, very unfair. And it could, some people worry, permanently damage the single market.

And so what other fault lines then has the pandemic exposed?

So the other main problem is that the weaknesses in the euro have really come to the fore. There's the longstanding problems in Spain and Italy, in Italy in particular, where it's high debt and low growth. And that means that Italy's got this enormous, pretty much unsustainable debt pile, and its response to the crisis is going to involve that debt pile getting even bigger. And so they're trying to come up with ways of getting around that with various recovery funds. But those are very, very controversial, because effectively, it would mean money going from richer countries in Northern Europe, such as Germany, into poorer countries such as Italy and Spain. And a third problem is on the constitutional level, where the legal authority of the European Court of Justice, which is supposed to have the final say on EU law, is being challenged. A German court determined that the ECJ had gone beyond its remit. And so now, on top of the previous problems, you now have big questions being asked about fundamentals of the rule of law within the EU.

I mean, these are some big, some serious structural problems.

How can they be solved, especially in the face of the crisis that Europe is now suffering?

A big problem is that fundamentally, people don't know what the EU is for. It means different things to different people. And that means that people are trying to push it in very, very different directions. And so the EU really has to answer a pretty fundamental question of what is its purpose? Do countries want to integrate themselves economically even further? Does the EU want to play a much larger global role? And what type of values does the EU want to put forward? Those are really fundamental questions that do require answers, and they can't be ducked. It does sound quite sort of airy-fairy, but most of the issues do sort of lead back to that.

But aside from addressing this common purpose question, Concretely, what would you do to address an agreement on, say, a fiscal union, on this idea of the North subsidising the South, those issues that have been around for years?

They've been around for years because they're very, very difficult to solve. Effectively, you can't solve the problem of a shared currency without shared spending, without a large political discussion, without a large political fight, as it were. But this is a fight that EU leaders fundamentally have been unwilling to have. And for that reason, it's just sort of muddled on. And that has just about worked for years now. But it does feel like the muddling on strategy is running out of road.

What about the chances of making a change to how the EU is put together, some real fundamental changes that essentially help create some of the political will?

That would be the cleanest way of doing it. But it would also be the most politically difficult way of doing it. If you want to change the EU's treaties, effectively its constitution, many countries will have to have referendums. And fundamentally, political leaders are scared that those referendums will be lost. And there's good reason to believe that the EU is not especially popular right now. This isn't to say that countries are going to start copying Brexit, far from it. Brexit's been pretty much a disaster from start to finish for the British. But it does mean that leaders will have a bias towards standing still and not trying to fix these problems. And problems, when they're not solved, do tend to fester. But as we've seen with the response to coronavirus, its current setup isn't especially viable. And it's not making— certainly in terms of prosperity, is no longer fulfilling its true purpose. And so that means EU leaders really do need to start thinking long and hard about what type of bloc they want it to be so it can continue to succeed.

Duncan, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to The Economist. To get 12 issues for $12 or £12, just go to economist.com/radiooffer. The people of El Salvador were in desperate need of change when their new president was inaugurated nearly a year ago. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] The man promising reform was Nayib Bukele, At 38, the youngest person ever to take charge of the country. His landslide victory broke the grip of the two parties that had governed since the end of a civil war in 1992. On their watch, El Salvador's murder rate became the world's highest. Salvadorans left the country in droves. Three of the previous four presidents had been charged with corruption. But there are deep concerns about the way Mr. Bukele is going about reforming El Salvador's young democracy. Some fear he's on course to become Latin America's first millennial dictator.

Nayib Bukele is the child of a rich Salvadorian family who spent much of his 20s managing nightclubs in the capital, San Salvador. About 10 years ago, he decided to get into politics, and it's It's been a very swift rise for him since then.

Richard Enser writes for The Economist and is based in Mexico.

He is one of the youngest leaders in the world. At 38, he is a millennial. And in the Salvadorian context, he exists outside of this very polarized post-Civil War political environment in which you had two traditional political parties that were both representing different sides of this civil war that ended in 1992, sharing power but not doing very much good. With it. On their watch, El Salvador remained in poverty. Violence increased dramatically to make it one of the most murderous countries on the planet. So it was fertile territory, to say the least, for a political outsider such as what Nayib Bukele presents himself to be.

And so he came to power promising to change all that. I mean, how has he done on that score?

Nayib Bukele is, in the eyes of critics, a damaging threat to many of the democratic institutions that have actually been built up since the end of El Salvador's civil war. And the most chilling set of events for many Salvadorans happened on the 9th of February this year, a day that Salvadorans now call 9F, Nueve F. Nayib Bukele has a security plan. He promised an anti-corruption commission. And he needs to negotiate with a Congress that he does not control in order to fund it. But rather than persisting or being patient within these negotiations or trying to deal with some of the concerns that lawmakers had about how this funding would work, he took the Army and went and staged a rally and a protest outside Congress. He then took machine gun-toting soldiers into the empty chamber, plonked himself down in the seat of the president of Congress, and invited the media in to film him sitting in a seat that very much did not belong to him. And it was this intimidatory tactic that for many observers marked a low point in the democratic life of El Salvador, young though it is.

I mean, how out of character is this for him in his time as leader? Is this unusual, or has there always been a hint of this?

Well, with Nayib Bukele and with many leaders around the world, if you want to know his character, look at the way that he has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, which of course threatens the fragile health system in El Salvador and its neighbouring countries. In El Salvador, the quarantine, if you break it, you will receive 30 days' confinement in what they call a containment centre, which is a kind of prison set up just to house these people. Who have broken quarantine. The conditions inside these so-called containment centers are atrocious according to the people who have seen them and been inside. Multiple people have died after receiving lackluster treatment inside there for COVID-19 itself and for other ailments. And the very arbitrariness of these arrests that lead to people being detained here has led to yet another constitutional crisis and another standoff between Mr. Bukele and the Supreme Court.

So given the platform he rose to power on, I mean, what are his achievements?

Nayib Bukele's biggest achievement without doubt is to preside over the continuing decline of El Salvador's murder rate. In 2017, 1 Salvadoran in 1,000 was murdered every year, and that was the highest in the world. Mr. Bukele came into power about 12 months ago, and it's continued to fall impressively since then. However, the circumstances of the lockdown have made things a little bit more complicated. Gangs are having trouble extorting because people cannot pay because no one is outside buying goods. And at the end of April, there was a flurry of killings which caused the murder rate to shoot back up again. And again, we saw this authoritarian hardline instinct come out from Mr. Bukele. He decreed via Twitter that he was authorizing the use of lethal force by police under pretty broad circumstances whenever they felt that themselves or anyone else was threatened by a gang member. And then he put on a show in one of El Salvador's prisons.

Shaved, chained, and crammed into prisons.

Tattoos mark their allegiance to different gangs, but here—

He collected lots of gang inmates into a single room. The prison guards, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 seemingly, applied a face mask to each inmate and forced them to strip to their underwear, sit down and huddle in single file with their legs wrapped around the waist of the inmate in front of them in a kind of humiliating pose designed to show everyone who was boss.

And so how have people reacted to that message? How have the people who put him in power reacted to what he's now revealing himself to be?

Well, this formula has been, until now, wildly successful. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of Salvadorans approve of Mr. Bukele's response to the pandemic. They think that he is protecting them. And many Salvadorans believe that if what they had in the past was called democracy, then they think that democracy has failed. And they are willing to try whatever formula Nayib Bukele wants to propose.

And you think that there's no end to that, to these kinds of displays of authoritarian streak and so on, they're ready for that too?

Well, Mr. Bukele faces the same problem that many leaders around the world face, which is that the pandemic is coming and so is a horrible economic depression, most likely in El Salvador. This is going to plunge many people who have escaped poverty in recent years and decades back into poverty. People will not be able to work. Remittances from the United States are not going to come. This is going to be a very difficult time and no leader should take for granted any support that they happen to have now as we go into the rest of 2020.

Richard, thanks very much for joining us.

Jason, it's a pleasure.

Despite having some of the world's most famous beaches, Indonesians are known for being relatively sun-shy. But as with so many other facets of life, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a shift.

Indonesians have really embraced sunbathing.

Charlie McCann is our Southeast Asia correspondent.

Kids are lying down on their driveways, they're on loungers and balconies. Residents of one Jakarta slum, which is located next to a metro line, have taken to draping themselves across the the train tracks while soldiers have been instructed by their commanders to take the sun every morning. And so there are pictures of them lying down in various sort of regular rows on their military bases, just drinking it in.

And, and why is that so surprising?

Indonesian culture idealizes pale skin, and many Indonesian women use skin whitening products. Indonesia is also home to the world's largest Muslim population. There are about 225 million of them, and the more pious among them dress very conservatively, so they aren't comfortable bearing that much skin. And yet everyone's rolling up their sleeves and sometimes even taking off their hijabs because they think that sunlight will help them to fend off COVID-19.

Well, why is it that they believe that?

One reason is because the Home Affairs Minister, Tito Karnavian, said in March that the disease can't spread in a tropical climate like Indonesia's. And he also invited the public to try and snuff out the disease by sunbathing. There was a man who was spotted in a Jakarta slum shouting, "Get rid of corona! Sunbathe, sunbathe! Let's go! Jakarta can!" [SPEAKING INDONESIAN] One student I spoke to, Farah Reinaldi, she and her family and all her friends, she said, believe that If you're not sunbathing, then you're not preventing COVID, right?

I mean, is there any science that suggests there's some truth in that?

No, there's no peer-reviewed science that says that sun will kill COVID-19. There are some studies that do suggest that coronaviruses are vulnerable to ultraviolet light. We know that UV does damage the genetic codes, and some medical centers have been using UV light to decontaminate masks. But experts warn of the potential dangers to humans, of course. With that said, we do know that vitamin D boosts the immune system, and sunlight is the main provider of vitamin D to humans. One doctor I spoke to at a hospital in Jakarta actually encourages his patients to sunbathe for 10 to 15 minutes every day, just because he says it's good for their overall health.

But I suppose what is known is that lots of exposure to the sun comes with its own health risks.

Yes, absolutely. You can burn, you can get skin cancer, and the government has actually begun to warn Indonesians about those health risks.

Well, in the absence of any science to back this up, I suppose all I can say is take precautions, Charlie.

Stay safe, Jason.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you. To follow all of The Economist's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it's swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com/coronavirus. That's all from us on The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and see you back here on Monday.