As Emmanuelle Macron noted, solidarity with countries affected by the coronavirus.
French President Emmanuel Macron believes that the moment of truth has come for the European Union, when the European community should show solidarity towards the countries affected by the outbreak of the new type of coronavirus disease. He said this in an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday.
“For us, the moment of truth has come when we must decide whether the European Union is a political or just a market project. I believe it is a political project. We need financial remittances and solidarity, if only for Europe to stay strong”, – Macron said.
“If we cannot do it today, I assure you that populism will win – today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow in Italy, Spain, perhaps France or anywhere. If this [EU] is a political project, then the human factor is the main one, and solidarity considerations should come into force, and the economy will push away from that. And let us not forget that the economy itself is a social science”, – said the President of France.
He is sure that if the EU countries are not able to help themselves in such a serious crisis, it will greatly affect the way the European Union will perceive in the future.
“People will start to say, ‘What kind of a wonderful trip [the EU] offers us? These people will not protect you in the crisis, nor after it, they will not stand in solidarity with you”, – Macron suggested.
The end of the globalization process.
In general, the President of France called the Coronavirus pandemic and the resulting global economic crisis “a huge anthropological shock” that will change a lot in people’s lives, first of all – will put an end to the globalization process.
“It will change the essence of the globalization in which we have lived for the last 40 years”, – the politician said.
He acknowledged that this process has made it possible to get rid of many totalitarian regimes and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. “But especially in recent years, it [globalization] has increased inequality in developed countries. It was clear that this type of globalization was reaching the end of the cycle, which was undermining democracy,” said Macron.
“We have stepped on the path of the unthinkable.”
At the same time, the French President admitted that he had no answer, at what stage the crisis was at the moment.
“I do not know whether we are at the beginning or in the middle of a crisis – nobody knows. Uncertainty has developed in everything we have to accept. We have stepped on the path of the unthinkable”, – he said.
“We all face a serious need to create something new, because that’s all we can do now”, –
the politician added.
Macron, in particular, believes the current pandemic will change people’s attitude towards the environment and once it is over, people will be more attentive to the quality of air they breathe. “People will say, ‘You stopped everything because of this disease, and now you want me to breathe bad air again’, – ” the president noted.
China’s measures.
Macron believes that the response to the new type of coronavirus pandemic in China and Western countries cannot be compared, and he is sure that not everything is known about Beijing’s actions.
Referring to freer access to information in Western countries and other differences, Macron said: “Given those differences, the decisions that have been made and what China, which I respect, is today, let’s not be so naive as to say that they did a lot better”, – Macron said.
“We don’t know. There are definitely things that happened that we don’t know about”, – he said.
An outbreak of the disease caused by the new coronavirus was recorded in late 2019 in Central China, and the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic on March 11.
During this time, more than 2 million people have been infected and almost 140,000 have died. In China itself during this time, according to official statistics 83.7 thousand people were infected, 3.3 thousand died.