He is a candid Emmanuel Macron, who confides in his doubts, fears and hopes in the face of the coronavirus crisis. “We are at a moment of truth, which is whether the European Union is a political project or a market project only. I think it's a political project, "the head of state told the Financial Times on Thursday . Who recognizes this: “I don't know if we are at the beginning or in the middle of this crisis - nobody knows. There are many uncertainties, and that should make us all very humble. "
In this interview with the British daily newspaper, the French president argues that "when it is a political project, first, the human is first and foremost, and there are notions of solidarity that play out, and including then the economy proceeds from it. Let us never forget that economics is a moral science. According to the French head of state, a lack of solidarity would encourage the populists to come to power.
Appeal to the richest countries
Emmanuel Macron militates for a pooling of debts in the form of "coronabonds", common European loans. But these are refused by Germany and the Netherlands, while the Italian public debt should grow to 155.5% of GDP in 2020 (against 134.8% in 2018 and 2019).
"It is obvious, because (the populists) will say: '' What is this (European) adventure that you are offering me? These people do not protect you when you have a crisis, they do not protect you the next day, they have no solidarity with you '' ”, he argues. Continuing what he considers to be a paraphrase of populist thought: “'' When you have migrants arriving at your home, they offer to keep them. When you have the epidemic coming to you, they offer to manage it. They are nice, basically. They are for Europe when it comes to exporting the goods they produce to your home, they are for Europe when it comes to having your cheap labor and producing car equipment that we do more in our countries, but they are not for Europe when we have to pool '' ”.
The French President still insists that giving up freedoms to fight the disease would pose a threat to Western democracies. "It is not because there is a health crisis that we must give up what is our deep DNA", he notes, in a transparent reference to the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who arrogated full powers in his country in favor of the crisis.
Gray areas in China
Emmanuel Macron believes that there are gray areas in the management of the coronavirus epidemic by China, telling the Financial Times that there were "obviously things that happened that we do not know". “We don't have a kind of naivety which consists in saying that (China's management of the epidemic) is much stronger. We do not know. And even, there are obviously things that have happened that we don't know. ”
The head of state's reservations about Beijing's handling of the crisis join the doubts expressed by London and Washington. The United Kingdom has just warned China on Thursday that it should answer "difficult questions about the appearance of the virus, and why it was not stopped earlier". The Trump administration, for its part, accused Beijing of having "concealed" the gravity of the epidemic at its beginning in China, and on Tuesday froze the American financial contribution to the functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing him of having aligned himself with the Chinese positions. The United States has also indicated that it is investigating whether the virus, although of natural origin, may have accidentally left a laboratory in Wuhan.
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