The coronavirus pandemic and efforts to fight it will dominate the agenda of Germany’s upcoming EU Council presidency, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has announced.
Germany will take over the rotating chair of the body, where EU foreign ministers discuss and adopt the union’s policies and laws, from Finland on 1 July for the rest of the year.
“We will make it a ‘Corona Presidency’ to overcome corona[virus] and its consequences,” Maas wrote in an article published in Die Welt on Sunday.
The minister stressed that one of the first tasks for the bloc will be to gradually ease restrictions on free travel and the internal market once “we are out of the woods”. Another goal will be to improve civil protection and the joint procurement and manufacturing of medical supplies.
Maas also called for the EU budget to become a “revival programme for Europe” over the next seven years. He said the bloc should begin investing massively in “research, climate protection, technological sovereignty, and crisis-proof health and social systems.”
Eurozone ministers this week agreed to a €500-billion ($540bn) aid package for European countries hit hard by the pandemic, which is still far less than the €1.5 trillion which the European Central Bank says the bloc might need to tackle the crisis. The bank has earlier adopted a separate €750-billion package to buy up government and company debt across the EU.
There have been 2,544 deaths reported in Germany as of Saturday out of more than 117,658 confirmed coronavirus cases, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the national centre for disease control. Another 57,400 patients have recovered.
Germany has a remarkably low death toll (around 1.5 percent), compared with fellow European countries like Italy (12.7%), the UK (12.5%), and Spain (10.1%). This is widely attributed to Germany’s robust testing programme: it has recently ramped up its capacity to 500,000 COVID-19 tests a week, one of the highest per capita rates in the world and far more than other European countries where testing has been confined to those who show symptoms of the virus and therefore at a higher risk of having complications.
