We need Europe’s rescue money, and Europe needs to give it to us

ANGELA Merkel and Emmanuel Macron tried to save the world last week. Or at least they tried to start saving the world, which by the looks of it might take some time.

But we’re high-fiving them anyway, for even wanting to do such a thing, at a time when many of the leaders of great nations want only raw power and plunder.

Merks and Mac have proposed that the EU borrows €500bn to be dispersed in grants to the countries hit hardest by the pandemic. With liability for the debt being added to the EU budget, the member states receiving the funds would not — and I can’t stress this enough — would not have to repay the money.

Naturally there will be individual governments dissenting from this great idea, because that is what they do. But with Germany and France backing it, and indeed fronting it, we can hope for the best.

Macron in particular has articulated the gravity of the situation, describing this as a “moment of truth” for the EU, which he rightly believes has been too slow and too small in its response.

And I believe that he and Merkel have also identified another large truth, in the way that things are going — they are seeing too much of our old friend, the crisis of leadership.

And Macron in particular would have a more acute understanding than most — his main opponent in the last election, Marine le Pen, was coming from a place of actual fascism.

So there is more to be fixed here than just the finances of various European countries. There’s a sense that Macron and Merkel have seen not just the big picture, but a picture of unimaginable horror, if “Europe” goes down. Because what else is left? The disease that we will loosely call nationalism has been out of control for some time now. America is lost to it. So is Britain. Though the pandemic has at least made it abundantly clear that such regimes are engaged essentially in the destruction of government, rather than maintaining its occasional function as a promoter of the greater good.

Basically, these guys are not here to help.

America, Britain, Russia, Brazil... whenever you look at the top of the coronavirus death table, there they are — these charlatans and hooligans and gangsters.

The likes of Piers Morgan seems only recently to have noticed that a Trump or a “Boris” are constitutionally incapable of acting in the public interest — but it could never have been any other way.

They have only been “found out” by people who weren’t looking too closely anyway, for their own dubious reasons. And they are still actually running large parts of the world.

In that sense, the damage is done.

Piers Morgan is not the only journalist who is seeing it too late — but at least you can now look at CNN, and see this headline running across the bottom of the screen: “Trump escalates distraction, deception, lies, as deaths soar.”

Fair enough, good solid journalism there. But as someone who wrote a long article in our LIFE magazine before the election of 2016, to the effect that Trump’s ambitions were plainly fascistic, I only wish there had been more of that, early doors.

Because like all “authoritarians”, like his collaborator Putin, it is hard to see Trump just accepting the result of an election that somehow goes against him. This is no longer a fanciful proposition, it would be a logical extension of everything he does, almost every day of the week, to trash what are quaintly known as the “norms”.

And as the various farright regimes are threatened by the power of a virus that they can’t eliminate in the usual ways, they may become even more dangerous — at which point, the need for some sort of vaguely decent arrangement among the nations of “Europe” will become of incalculable importance.

Indeed, it is so incalculable that my only doubt about the Merkel/ Macron proposal is that €500bn seems too definite a number, too little.

The only number they should be looking at now, is “whatever it takes”. Because this is not just a rescue mission, it’s a recognition that “Europe” — as a potential force for good — is now on its own among the great powers. It is still broadly democratic in its disposition, and all these ruined economies must be stabilised in order to hold back another wave of “authoritarians”.

Merkel and Macron are seeing this, as big as a basketball, and they must be supported to the hilt by all people of good will — at a stretch there is even a possible alternative ending to Brexit, if Britain decides it might prefer after all not to go down the tubes.

But that would be the right thing to do, and they haven’t been doing that for a long time. Indeed the Merkel/Macron plan is one of those truly rare moments when it seems that the right thing is being done, for the right reasons.

And the money will be nice too.

‘It’s hard to see Trump accepting an election result that goes against him’