Category: EUROPE

All countries will suffer. But countries with inefficient governments will suffer more than others

This blog post has featured in Libertad Digital (Spain), LIFO (Greece), European Pravda (Ukraine), Bloomberg Views (USA), The TOC (Greece), Nius Diario (Spain), iefimerida (Greece), Ta Nea (Greece), The Globe and Mail (Canada), South EU Summit (Italy), Information (Denmark), Capital (Bulgaria)

When the covid-19 pandemic broke out in Europe, no government had any experience of how to face it and each tried to weather the storm in its own ways. Some governments fared better, some less so. By and large, there are three major factors that have determined, and still do, how governments cope with the virus. These are, first, the resoluteness and efficiency of their leadership; second, the capacity of states and public health systems in particular to deal with such an extraordinary health crisis situation; and, third, the cooperation of national publics in following emergency rules. At a more specific level, as shown by an even cursory comparison of the Spanish and Greek experiences with the pandemic, it seems that a well-integrated and liberal government performs significantly better than one which is disunited and, moreover, diluted with populists. Let’s have a closer look at the two cases.

At the time of this writing (5 April 2020), Spain has close to 130,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus victims and about 12,000 deaths. At the same time, Greece has about 1,700 confirmed cases and 68 deaths. So, the question is: Why these two Mediterranean countries, whose people are equally sun-loving, bar-hopping, and intensely social, and which should have drawn the same lessons from Italy’s preceding experience, have had such different fates during the early phase of the coronavirus crisis? The answer is simple, almost mundane: Different governments!

Continue reading “The politics of pandemic prevention in Spain and Greece”