“In its origins, Europe fled from nationalism; today, in the face of every crisis, it retreats”

These days the role and future of Europe is once again in question. How do you assess the response that the European Union is giving to this crisis so far?

We have had a rather complicated start. We are still far from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as to what the European response is going to be. There has been an ugly, bad, nasty first stage, if you like, in the withholding of shipments of material to Italy, which has generated so much controversy and frustration. I believe that this has been quickly rectified. The European Commission intervened and showed solidarity, or at least tried not to make things worse and was willing to help. The European Central Bank, with Christine Lagarde at its head, at first seemed to turn a blind eye, saying: Well, this does not necessarily apply to us'. In 2008, when the financial crisis broke out, it took the ECB four years to utter Mario Draghi's famous 'whatever it takes'; now it has taken almost four days to react. From that point of view, we have not seen a panic in the markets, a contagion effect.

A country like Italy, which is very vulnerable - like us - because of its debt, has not seen the famous risk premium return, which is very important. They have been able to build a dam, but we are missing something else. The Union can still help the States with a supply of medical equipment, but it is doing a great deal to keep the internal market open. There is some activity that may not be very visible, but it is there. However, what is really at stake for the European Union is whether it is going to be able to help the States to incur all that expenditure in order to pick up the losers in the crisis and the most vulnerable, those who lose their jobs, the companies that close. The question now is what kind of response the European Union is going to be able to give and whether it is going to come up with resources that go beyond verbal solidarity. A very emotional and tough debate has opened up in the first few stages between the South and the North. The revival of prejudices and stereotypes has been very disheartening.

In addition to this major battle against the pandemic, Europe is waging a battle against a nationalist regression that has been reinforced by the virus and, as Felipe González says, this is something that goes against the historical sense of the European Union.

We have a project that has been political from the outset, of escape and of European reconstruction in the deepest and most moral sense of the term, of fundamental values, of democracy and human rights... At the very beginning of the European project we were fleeing or moving away from nationalism and yet, every time we come up against a crisis - be it a refugee crisis, an economic crisis or a health crisis - the instinct to regress appears. Once again this habit of forgetting that we are interdependent, that we cannot close the borders because it makes no sense and that the response we have to give is to redouble our efforts outwards. But that first stage - also, in part, because health and health care is a matter that is administered at state level and the European Union has no powers - makes it logical that it should be the states that are responsible for protecting their citizens. We have been talking about the Europe that must protect, welcome and be useful to its citizens for a long time, and if it does not appear here, they are going to wonder what it is for.

We are still left with the lengthy shadow of the 2008 financial crisis and the management of that crisis by the elites, which led to a huge wave of indignation. Then came the populisms, which became a global phenomenon. What mistakes were made then that we shouldn't make now?

Quite a few were made, but perhaps the main one was to try to act separately, to think that each state could go its own way. We took so long to act that we caused enormous damage to people's confidence in the European Union's political system. Interestingly, that damage was as extensive on the creditors as on the debtors, which makes no sense at all because someone should have been happy: the one who is supposed to have exercised power, tightened the screws and short-circuited the southern states; or those in the south because they were finally supported by the ECB and managed to get out of the crisis. The scenario was terrible because everyone came out unhappy and, above all, we revived national prejudices, perhaps older, unproductive and harmful stereotypes. That is, despite all the differences with the current crisis, what we must prevent with all our might from re-emerging.

Perhaps the way to do this is precisely by realising that this COVID-19 crisis affects everyone equally. Even though it has had the misfortune to start with southern Europe, it has again taken the form of an asymmetric crisis attacking countries that are already vulnerable from a fiscal and economic point of view because they are emerging from a crisis or have a reputation for non-compliance, giving rise to a false sense of security in other countries that think that their health systems are more powerful because there have been no cuts, that they have acted in time, that they are going to be able to get out of it. As long as we have a new asymmetric crisis in which some suffer a great deal and others more or less go through the crisis unscathed, the divisions are going to get worse. What would be very sad is to return to this mentality of "this is not for me, I have managed to get out and save myself".

Luis Suárez Mariño asks us a question that connects with what you are sharing with us: "Do important economies such as France, Italy or Spain itself have the strength, along with countries such as Luxembourg, Ireland and Portugal, to impose their theses on the European Council and give the Union a boost?

I do not believe that it is so much a question of imposing, and perhaps that was the starting point of last week's European Council. It is very difficult to impose on someone, unless it is by going back to the old language of Varoufakis in the euro crisis, threatening to wreck my economy as a way of dragging down the rest - and that would not make any sense. If the Italian and Spanish economies come to a standstill and go into a deep economic crisis, it is going to be bad for the Dutch, the Germans and for the whole of Europe, because our economies are interdependent. It is neither wise nor prudent to enter into this kind of confrontation. Rather than imposing, what we need to do is persuade, convince and make it appear that we are all going to be better off, including those who, in principle, might have a moral reluctance to help us because they think we are a bunch of spendthrifts. Let them help us because it is in their own interests, because as well as solidarity and values, it will be much more effective as long as we are saving companies and jobs for all Europeans. That is what is at stake. The crisis must be unnamed.

Sometimes the language of war or football comes out, but this is not Italy against the Netherlands or Spain against Germany, or "I'm going to take away your Eurobonds" or "I'm not going to let you touch my wallet". That is a national zero-sum game, where what you win, I lose, and therefore I will fiercely resist. Let's think about building a response where we all minimize losses first and then do it differently. Let's avoid this language of imposition and look for a way to give an impetus to the union that will make us emerge with lessons learned and stronger institutions. Our internal market has four freedoms of movement: people, capital, services and goods. We have discovered a fifth element that circulates freely: viruses. This means that we cannot fight effectively if we do not do so in a united manner. And the internal market, the source of well-being on which we all feed, is in danger and we must therefore act in a coordinated fashion to rescue it.

Another political debate that has resurfaced is the tension between authoritarianism and democracy. We are hearing a lot about the idea that China's authoritarian model has worked better in the face of this pandemic than the European Union's system of freedoms and defence of the welfare state.

Absolutely not. There has been - and still is - considerable interest on the part of the Chinese Government in rectifying its image, from a public relations, propaganda and, in some cases, disinformation and manipulation point of view. China is applying a whole range of the friendliest means, the diplomacy of masks, of donations, although a report by the European Union's Disinformation Unit has also been made public, in which we see that there are numerous players who are using the crisis to assert themselves, to gain space for geopolitical action, to increase their reputation or to damage the reputation of others. China feels very badly affected because it knows, firstly, that the origin of the virus lies in its territory, in control processes that are quite defective from a health point of view - and practices to which the WHO has already drawn their attention and which have already generated a virus such as SARS. Moreover, at first, they covered up the disease by sanctioning the doctors.

So now they have to make a huge effort to contain the disease and correct the public relations campaign, to focus on alleviating the damage to its image by helping everyone else. It is true that it has been said that their brutal confinement measures have been very effective and that this is an example for everyone. There are peoples in Italy who have applied such brutal confinement measures with similar success on a smaller scale than Wuhan. What I mean by this is that there are sufficient models of success in Asia in the fight against the coronavirus in democratic societies, such as Taiwan, South Korea or Japan. What distinguishes the Spanish and Italian response from the Asian one has less to do with the political regime than with the existence of prevention structures adapted to this specific type of virus, which had already been developed since SARS. I was in Singapore on February 4 when this began: it is a country that is sometimes a little blurred, it has illegitimate characteristics in terms of freedom of the press and politics, but it is neither a complete dictatorship nor a complete democracy. They, with six million inhabitants, which is more than the province of Madrid, have had three deaths.

Why? Because their public administration is effective, and their health and emergency administration knew how to deal with the crisis. Democracies are perfectly capable of dealing with a pandemic effectively if they want to and if they have decided to do so, just as Trump or Boris Johnson decided otherwise. They are much more serious, because Italian and Spanish incompetence' - Spain should also have learned something from the Italian experience - is different. What has occurred here is an absolute informative cognitive dissonance, with a very human reflex of "this is not going to happen to me", which is where the failure of our administration lies. As Ivan Krastev said in an interview I gave him two weeks ago for El Mundo, we have been educating our citizens for years not to panic, we have convinced them that behaving responsibly is to carry on with their normal lives: in the event of a terrorist attack, they want you to stay home and be afraid, not to go out and buy, not to go on with your life; in the event of a financial crisis, we ask them not to take money out of the bank, not to lock themselves in and not to stop buying, because that is going to create a worse crisis. We have educated our populations in democracy and freedom not to panic, and suddenly governments have had to instil fear in their citizens, they have had to say "hey, be afraid, stay home". This is a U-turn in political leadership, where people have been told that heroism is staying at home. This is very contradictory: how can I be a hero when I am locked up in my house?

This crisis is taking place in a context of trade war between the United States and China. How do you think this tense relationship can transform the crisis we are facing?

It's one more battle in the struggle between the U.S. and China, in this strategic rivalry that some say goes back, analytically, to the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. We are in what Graham Allison has called "the Thucydides trap", that is, the fact that there have been sixteen major power shifts in international relations, twelve of which were violent and only four peaceful. Therefore, there are two countries that are sometimes destined to clash; at other times, it seems that they have so much power together that they are condemned to understand each other, because we live in a globalised world and they cannot aspire to that dominion separately. Here we have seen these two sides simultaneously. On the one hand, we have a confrontational reaction: Trump accuses China of being irresponsible, holding its hand and also taking the opportunity to accompany everything with public relations. China has also responded in a very harsh way, sowing doubts about whether the United States was at the origin of the outbreak of the virus. And there is no doubt that China is also thinking about how, after this whole crisis, it is going to reposition itself in Africa and in countries where it already has a very strong presence from a strategic point of view, including in the heart of Europe. In Serbia we have seen posters in the streets that say "thank you Xi" in Chinese.

The United States has made a huge mistake from the point of view of its leadership: instead of being able to offer an alternative model of solidarity, of support - even if it were based on its own strategic interest - to the free world, to the democracies, it has played at being absent. Only now are they realising that, with all their allies, if it does not appear now, it will not be able to do so later. It is the same with the European Union: we have a strategy towards Africa that talks about climate change and digitalisation, but that is irrelevant right now; if you do not turn up now to support the countries with which you have partnerships and strategic interests, you cannot do so in six months' time and say how it went, I am sorry, why do we not talk about climate change again, which is what interests me'. Everyone is realizing that if you don't show up now, that space is going to be filled by someone else. We've seen Cuban doctors in Italy, Russian trucks driving on the highways... All these kinds of phenomena have meant that, even if it wasn't for solidarity but for a slightly more strategic interest, the United States is realizing that it has to be here globally. Therefore, we are going to see a little of this type of competition. It is very important for the European Union that this does not remain just a new rivalry between the United States and China, where it is in the middle of watching the ball pass from one side to the other.

What geopolitical interests are behind these disinformation campaigns, 'fake news' and propaganda that you are talking about?

They're not hiding, they're very obvious. The whole project of connectivity of the Silk Road and the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative consists of having a strategic strength to be able to supply its economy with raw materials, but also with useful political relations both in the whole African continent and, of course, in Southeast Asia and Latin America. It is nothing different from what the United States does and has been doing since World War II: a global maritime deployment where it ensures that all the supply lines that are vital to its economy can be protected by bases placed all over the world. Chinese investment in Africa in connectivity, too. We are seeing it even in Europe itself, in infrastructure not only physical but also digital, which is also a capacity for political protection.

It is not that China wants to impose its model, it is not a power that wants its model based on the Communist Party and a privatised but state-run economy to be imposed on the rest of the world, but it does want to buy political space so that nobody questions its model. If you ask me, such obvious interests would not be reprehensible if we consider that this is the great game played by States in the sphere of international relations, but it is a game that the European Union must be able to temper, to intervene. We cannot live in a world that is a geopolitical jungle, we need an international order based on rules, where your power does not determine everything you can do and you are exonerated from all breaches. We Europeans live in a multilateral order based on rules and we must therefore be able to play this geopolitical game. That is why the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, has said that Europe must learn to speak the language of power, but it must learn to speak it in order to create institutions, so that we do not live in an anarchic world where pure and naked power dictates what happens and who wins.

Can this health crisis lead to a loss or restriction of individual freedoms in some countries?

There is no doubt that a national emergency always generates a situation of some democratic anomaly, while there is a supporting and uniting effect behind the government to fight this threat. In this case it is not military, but there are many elements of existential challenge from the point of view of the physical security of citizens. I agree with those who have said that this is not a war and that we should not think in those terms, but that in some things we are going to act as if we were at war, because there is indeed a vital issue for the future of this country and its citizens and the State has a responsibility to act. There is a State that has emergency powers that give it very broad discretion. We are seeing this in a country such as ours; we do not need to go into the excesses of Orbán, who has taken advantage of this to give himself many more powers than are necessary to suspend Parliament and grant himself those powers indefinitely.

Of course we have that problem. In the end, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not as sharp a cut as we would often like. Over the years, we have been reading How Democracies Die and various studies by Schneider or Levitsky on the fact that populisms have reminded us that democracies die little by little, they lose essential aspects and, therefore, you have to be on the alert when they are still full democracies. There is no margin for relaxation until you reach a dictatorship, because then it is too late. You can't even let your guard down in a normal democracy. Today in Spain we have a controversy about the press conferences in the Council of Ministers, journalists say that the government filters the questions through a group of WhatsApp.

This is not acceptable and the journalists have stood up. The Government says that it is going to look for a technical solution so that the questions can be asked live. There are hundreds of platforms that all of us citizens are using since the lockdown started to get on with our lives digitally, to be able to have this kind of dialogue. I do not know why the President of the Government cannot receive a question from a journalist as I am receiving it now. That is important, because if you are going to ask for unity - and that is the fundamental issue in a democracy - in return you have to be able to offer transparency and information, and you have to seek the co-responsibility of the parliaments.

There is a very tempting slope for any government in crisis situations that you can slide down, and that is why I say that you don't have to think about China or Orban: the founding fathers of the American Constitution designed a system deciding whether it was going to be for angels or for demons. When you design an institutional system you have to think of the worst and you have to build dams to prevent these authoritarian slides. Right now the government has the capacity to intervene in the economy, the labour market, to make a lot of decisions that clearly go beyond normal powers. In fact, our fundamental rights, such as freedom of movement and assembly, are de facto suspended. This is the case in dictatorships. We are not a dictatorship, even though we have suspended those rights, because we have done so in a responsible way and before Parliament, but by this - I hope I am not being misunderstood - I mean that those who are in the grey and the landslides are there, so they have to be handled democratically.

We have received a question from Patricia Abad which coincides with one of our questions. The World Health Organization warned countries to prepare for a pandemic, but it is clear that this did not happen. Should we reflect on the role, weight and influence that international bodies actually have in order to strengthen it? I even see a certain parallel with that inaction of governments in the face of the United Nations' continuous warnings about the climate emergency.

There are two kinds of mistakes here. The first, perhaps the most excusable, is the error of unforeseeability: you have not prepared adequately because you think the probability is very low that it will happen to you or because you have not really been in a similar situation before. Most citizens do not carry snow chains in their cars, because the probability of needing them is very low and when it snows a lot every five years, a disaster occurs because it is an unforeseen event. But it is something that can be understood within a framework of exceptionality and low probabilities. The other type of unforeseeable event is more negligent, which is a failure of the system to function: when you are not able to place yourself in front of a crisis knowing what you are going to need to do in one, two, three, five weeks.

With measures and warnings from the World Health Organisation, in the future - once we have diagnosed the errors as such, we can clear them, understand them or do what we want with them - we have to make sure that we act differently next time. With what we know now, we will certainly have a warning mechanism, strategic production lines and warehouses in the future, just as we have salt warehouses on the roads and winter machinery to clear the roads of snow, however unlikely or unlikely that may be. Why did the Asian countries know how to react in time and why did they do temperature control and insulation? Because they had been through something similar. And here perhaps the WHO has not been forceful enough and the European governments have been too confident. Of course, they will not be able to do so in the future. I hope that at some point we will see a very serious and professional 1000-page report on what went wrong and how we will have to prevent anything like that from happening again here.

How do you think our government is responding to this emergency? And how do you assess the functioning of the autonomic model in the face of this crisis?

There are these two levels, in fact, and almost a third because, as we said at the beginning, we are decentralised downwards, towards the autonomous communities, but also upwards, towards the European Union, and this may generate a certain feeling of helplessness. It has been said that this is a crisis that is going to validate the role of experts and put an end to populists, and it is true that the irresponsible charlatanism of some politicians has been very much exposed. We cannot blame a populist government in Italy for the late reaction. In the specific case of Spain, the very guidelines of the experts, of Fernando Simón and of the Centre for Crisis Prevention and Control and Alerts, have not worked. They have clearly been wrong, and it has been the experts who are dedicated to these things who have not been able to warn or trigger reactions. We have not had a confrontation between experts in the institutions dedicated to this issue who were telling the government to close down and the government refused to do so. That is not really the case with us from the point of view of casuistry - without apologising for any mistakes the government itself may have made - but it is clear that they have not confronted their experts, but have followed their advice and have therefore increased or aggravated the chain of errors. We will have to look at this very carefully.

Then, our autonomous system has shown something very worrying and that is that it is decentralised beyond the possibility of regaining control in health emergency situations. Without questioning that, for day-to-day life, the Spanish health system is magnificent - life expectancy in Spain, despite the crisis, has increased to the point that we are about to catch up with Japan as the world's longest living countries, that is, our health system is one of the best in the world, even with cutbacks - but what cannot be acceptable is that a State does not have the capacity to take control in an emergency crisis of how the health system works in this case. This has been seen in the issue of procurement, where power and capacity was non-existent and we have found that, as in education, we have unfortunately decentralised the system without having retained the quality control and crisis management capabilities that a State has when it becomes truly federal, when it has sufficient authority reserved at a central level to guarantee a minimum.

It is not acceptable that the Minister for Health should have to appeal to the solidarity of anyone in order to distribute patients or to move health professionals from one side of the territory to the other. If there is a situation of alarm and health emergency, this cannot depend on the solidarity of autonomous communities. I am sure that they will show solidarity and they will do so, but just as the State is capable of paralysing blast furnaces in the Basque Country, it must be capable of using the health resources of the whole country in a flexible way and distributing them wherever they are needed. That has been made very clear by this crisis. It is not so much that we have to think about whether we should re-centralise, but rather that we have known for some time that horizontal coordination is only coordination, it is only voluntary and it does not work, and we therefore need to be able to establish it.

Another reader, Juan Pablo Gómez Garrido, shares a reflection, almost a warning, with us and I would like to know what you think. He says that "China is taking measures to avoid a second wave and that Spain, together with the European Union, should take measures as well". He also warns that "in this sense, air transport also works as a perfect transmitter of the virus".

I am speaking here as a political scientist, but I do note something that I think is very obvious: we do not know enough. We do not know and the epidemiologists do not yet know. We are having a discussion about a paper by one of the most prestigious institutions, Imperial College, which tells us that with 95% accuracy there could be between one million and seven million people infected in Spain. This is like when in the euro crisis there were headlines in the European press saying that Spain could need between 10 and 200 billion in bailouts. In other words, we do not know enough about this epidemic, about this virus, about its spread, about its mortality. We do not know how many people are infected and, at the moment, we are not going to know because, logically, we are focused on saving the maximum number of lives and preventing the health system from collapsing.

What do the experts tell us? That until we know how many people have really been infected in this first wave we will not be able to know how to return to normal, if we are going to go out by periods, by waves, by ages, by sectors, with reduced social distances, we are going to have to become a little Swedish or Finnish for a long time. We also do not know if the vaccine is going to take what the experts say it normally takes, 12 to 18 months, or if we are going to have it earlier because it can be adapted or retake vaccines that were being tested for SARS and similar viruses. At this point it's very risky to make any kind of prediction about how, when and with whom we're going to get out of this. Because it is also very strange that China has managed to limit the pandemic to Wuhan province, when the rest of the planet is confined. What is happening in the rest of China? Is it really feasible to contain it and not to contaminate the rest of the country? We don't really know. Any politician right now has to focus on what lies ahead, which is saving as many lives as possible.

Without a doubt the level of uncertainty is huge, disproportionate. Do you think that the management of this crisis, as happened with the financial crisis, is going to configure a new scenario, a new political map in Spain?

The coalition that sustains the government is a coalition that was designed for politics, despite all the polarisation and everything that was going on. Now it seems to us that this policy is normal, at that time it seemed exceptional due to a degree of confrontation, because we were emerging from a crisis. We are almost coming out of a triple populist crisis. We have had a populist outburst from 2015-2016, with the emergence of that first Podemos, which is very contentious, very anti-system, which has then receded and has been given additional elements. But we have also had Catalan independence, which has been another outbreak of populism that wanted to do away with the constitutional system. We have even put an end to Vox, also to another type of questioning of the system itself. All this has suddenly been more or less in flux and seemed to have stabilised with a government that, indeed, left many questions in the air regarding its stability, but which we all hoped would be able to pass budgets and make left-wing policies.

I think all this has disappeared. This legislature has ended with the emergency decree because we are not going to be able to return to normal politics in the left-right game. I believe that we can and should make a perhaps legitimate criticism that unity must not only be asked for, but also built, and that is fundamentally the responsibility of the President of the Government. This past week has been quite disastrous from the point of view of achieving that unity. The business community, the opposition and journalists have felt that the government's call for unity was not matched by gestures of inclusion, but by gestures of exclusion and, in a sense, of authority, and by a strengthening of ideological discourse within the government. I have written about Podemos, I have studied the Podemos phenomenon and I am concerned that in this crisis, the not very transforming instincts about the Podemos system or anti-system will once again come to the fore with some of the elements that seem to me to be most harmful to its political programme, which is a very state-run vision of the economy, very paternalistic of society, with a very aggressive rhetoric from a discursive point of view.

It seems to me that all those elements of the initial Podemos populism that appear now do not help to build this account of a united front, of a policy of consensus focused only on getting out of the crisis. It seems to me that this government is not going to be able to get out of this crisis by saying "well, the crisis is over, let's keep going". Either it is indebted to the opposition in an irreversible way in order to sustain its policies and, therefore, it will not be able to simply cut ties and that will be it; or it ignores the opposition, which is going to be very difficult because we are going to move towards a very acute polarisation. The worst thing that can happen to us is to go through a terrible crisis from the point of view of the cost of living and the economy, far more polarised and far more divided than we are going to be. I think it is not sustainable and it should concern us all.