No trust in Europe

The vast majority of Europe's political leaders have learned nothing from the harsh consequences of the 2008 economic crisis. Now, in a much more serious situation and with enormous risks for the European Union, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is absolutely shameful and ignorant behaviour. 

For many years, thousands of European citizens have wondered what the European Union is for, because what went beyond the major political decisions and measures taken represented an outright defence of the interests of the responsible politicians of the two great powers, Germany and France. Not even the interests of the various social sectors in each of the two countries, which historically clashed in the two Great World Wars, but for the electoralist benefit of the parties in power at the time. In Germany, the Conservatives with Angela Merkel at their head and, in France, it depended on the circumstances that brought down the Socialist Government of François Hollande and gave birth to a new saviour in the figure of Emmanuel Macron, who has soon begun to decline. 

It can be argued that political leaders are conditioned by the interests of large business corporations in different sectors. Without a doubt, the guidelines safeguard the profits and bonuses of those economic interests, but the experience that all European countries suffer from is that the impression that, in times of crisis as serious as the economic one or now with the coronavirus health pandemic, European leaders wear their nationalist-populist hats, to preserve their local support, and renounce the most elementary of Europeanist policies such as the essential solidarity. 

For those who are convinced of the need for and the daily success of the Union for Europeans, with the euro and other great achievements as their flagship, the current selfishness and racketeering of the north towards its southern partners, which is absolutely unacceptable, poses a lethal lack of confidence for the immediate future. Not only is Brexit a sad example of the errors of recent years, the rise of the extreme right and the extreme left in all countries is a challenge to the stability of each one and it is all the result of public frustration and disillusionment, which perceives the European Union as a simple club of economic and commercial interests, of privileged bureaucrats, distanced from the founding principles and values of solidarity and support in general in order to prevent a new world war with European origins. 

A club that is not capable of assuming a common leadership with concrete measures in the interest of all when crises as deep as the employment crisis in 2008 or now with the coronavirus that is going to affect millions of Europeans, not Spanish or Italian or French, Europeans, has a present and future that is more than uncertain. We must recover the basic concept of the EU and confidence, because it continues to be essential for everyone.