As the second wave of COVID-19 infections in the past few weeks started filling hospital wards across Europe and countries inched reluctantly toward varying degrees of partial lockdown, TV schedules were cleared to allow leaders to address weary nations.
Announcing a 6pm curfew for the country’s restaurants and bars, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Monday last week called for national unity.
“If we all respect these new rules during the month of November, we will succeed in keeping the epidemiological curve under control,” Conte said. “That way, we will be able to ease the restrictions and move into the Christmas festivities with greater serenity.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Speaking from the Elysee Palace in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday last week decreed a new national lockdown, lasting until at least Dec. 1, and warned France that the new wave of COVID-19 infections was likely to be “deadlier than the first.”
In Belgium, where COVID-19 is spreading faster than in any other European country, new Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said he hoped that “a team of 11 million Belgians” would pull together to follow tighter regulations.
In tone and spirit, the messages echoed those delivered in March, when shock and fear led populations to rally around leaders and consent to restrictions unknown outside wartime.
Eight months later, that kind of trust and goodwill is in short supply.
Europe once again is the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for almost half the world’s infections last week.
As desperately needed financial support fails to materialize, and track-and-trace systems fail to cope with the surge, there is public exasperation and, in some cases, open rebellion.
In Florence, protesters on Friday last week threw Molotov cocktails at police, in the latest outbreak of social unrest following Conte’s new rules.
Pino Esposito, a Neapolitan barber, is one of those who has lost faith in the orders coming from the top.
In his home city, Esposito is leading a group of small-business owners in a campaign against the new restrictions.
“We are protesting, because all European governments, including ours, have found themselves unprepared for the second wave,” Esposito said. “Since March, they were saying that, in October or November, the second wave would come and that it would be even more serious.”
“But no preparation has been put in place for our schools, the health system, jobs or the providing of incentives. And the financial support we were promised is not there to access. But businesses must have it if they are to stay closed and staff need unemployment money immediately,” he said.
Across the continent, there is similar evidence of people facing dire economic hardship and psychological exhaustion.
The WHO last month reported widespread apathy and reduced motivation to follow public health guidance.
The emotional toll of COVID-19 has been compounded by a growing scepticism in the capacity of governments to truly get on top of a crisis that is destroying people’s livelihoods as well as threatening their health.
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said that the continent’s partial economic recovery in the summer and early autumn was “unequal, uncertain and incomplete.”
As the second wave hits, “it now risks being extinguished,” Lagarde said.
From Milan to Manchester and Marseille to Madrid, that prospect has sparked a wave of revolts. After the spring lockdown was eased, the subsequent patchwork of regulations and restrictions hit some workers and regions far harder than others.
Madrid has railed against a new 10pm curfew, leading the Spanish government to impose a state of emergency on the capital.
The mayors of nine cities, including Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Milan, have bypassed their national governments to write directly to European Council President Charles Michel, demanding access to the 750 billion euro (US$873 billion) EU recovery fund.
In Germany, where a partial lockdown began on Monday, thousands of workers and employers in the arts and hospitality industries last week marched in Berlin, demanding greater financial support.
Freelancers across the continent have fallen through the cracks of state support for those unable to work.
In Italy, a tipping point appears to be disturbingly close.
Angry demonstrations erupted in Naples, after a local curfew was imposed on Oct. 24. The protests were followed by civil disorder in Milan and Turin, where luxury stores were looted.
“I think this is only the beginning,” Italian journalist Roberto Saviano said. “In the first lockdown, Italians were united in the idea that this was a wholly novel emergency, a situation that any government would find difficult to deal with. Now they feel deceived.”
“They have been told that things were going well, that we were winning. But their savings have been used up, they can see the problems with a testing system that is not working, and there is confusion and disagreement between the scientists. People have started to lose faith in the capacity of institutions to save them,” he said.
A poll following the riots late last month found that more than three-quarters of Italians believe that there would be more violence in the streets this winter.
“There will be unrest across Europe too,” Saviano said. “It will happen in different ways and with different catalysts, but it will come because the center isn’t holding any more,”
“We are a world away from the mood in March when it was a case of ‘we must follow the rules and protect ourselves or we will perish.’ Now some people think: Well, I’m going under anyway if I cannot survive economically,” he said.
Christophe Guilluy, a geographer whose books have charted the growing social divisions between provincial and metropolitan France, is similarly pessimistic about sustaining a mood of unity.
Over the summer, local leaders in Marseille complained bitterly that a nighttime curfew and mask regulations had been imposed by Paris without due consultation.
Macron’s move to impose a new lockdown is already creating new divisions, as those with sufficient means insulate themselves from the worst of what is to come, Guilluy said.
On Thursday last week, huge traffic jams built up as Parisians attempted to flee the capital and head for their second homes before a 9pm curfew.
“Parisians who have fled to their second homes are running the risk of infecting inhabitants of provincial and rural areas. They have been very badly received,” Guilluy said.
“Inequalities between classes and between regions have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The truth is, social and cultural tensions have rarely been so acute in France, but the political classes are attempting to mask them by appealing to a sense of republican unity,” he said.
Political rivalries and ambitions that predate the pandemic are also complicating the response to the second wave.
In Belgium — where overwhelmed hospitals in Liege have asked medical staff infected with COVID-19 to keep working — concerted action was stymied by high-profile disputes between politicians from the Flemish-speaking north and the Francophone south.
The country has now locked down until the middle of next month, but Flanders Minister President Jan Jambon had previously claimed that tough action was necessary only in Wallonia.
By the time of his U-turn last week, 600,000 Belgians were believed to be spreading COVID-19.
“From May through June and right up until recently, you have seen a growing polarization of opinion in public debate,” said Dave Sinardet, a political science professor at Saint-Louis University-Brussels.
“The virologists would push for tougher measures, but there was a growing lobby for keeping the economy more open. So in September, when the infection rate was rising sharply, there was still a reduced level of restrictions. There’s a lot of criticism of the people who were giving that advice,” he said.
The obvious failure of the country’s track-and-trace system is contributing to a sense of disillusionment with the management of the COVID-19 crisis.
“There is frustration and a feeling that businesses such as cafes and restaurants did a lot and the government didn’t do enough,” Sinardet said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has added the UK to the list of European countries shutting down for a second time.
“November will be the month of truth,” German Minister of Finance Olaf Scholz said.
The indicators are that the struggle could go either way. The pace and intensity of the surge in infections has taken governments by surprise and left them looking unprepared.
Public acceptance of a renewed lockdown might need improved support and solidarity governments are prepared to offer.
The financial cost will likely be enormous, but the price of inaction could be much higher.
In a column for Italian newspaper La Stampa last week, former Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari, who teaches philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, wrote: “A social crisis has been added to the public health crisis. It is creating differences in income and living conditions which are completely incompatible with what we mean by ‘democracy.’ Are we aware of this? Up to now, I do not think so. But there is not a moment to lose.”
The stakes were dramatically high before the first lockdown in March. They might be even higher now.
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