EU leaders discuss bloc’s Covid recovery at summit

EUROPEAN Union leaders are meeting in person for two days of talks in Portugal, in a sign that they see the threat from Covid-19 on the continent as waning amid the vaccine rollout.

The talks are aimed at repairing some of the damage the coronavirus has caused in the bloc in areas such as welfare and employment.

“The (pandemic) recovery is still in an early stage,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen conceded in her opening speech.

In a late addition to their agenda, EU leaders will also discuss Thursday’s US proposal to share the technology behind Covid-19 vaccines to help speed up the end of the pandemic.

The leaders will also take part in an unprecedented meeting, via videoconference, with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, whose country needs more help with a devastating virus surge – and who can smooth the path to an elusive bilateral trade deal. It comes as Modi faces growing pressure to impose a strict nationwide lockdown, despite the economic pain it will exact, as a surge in coronavirus cases hammers the country’s health system.

Many medical experts, opposition leaders and even Supreme Court judges are calling for national restrictions, arguing that a patchwork of state rules is insufficient to quell the rise in infections.

Covid-19 has forced high-level political talks to move online over the past year in Europe. This is the 27-nation bloc’s first face-to-face summit in five months, after an exceptional meeting in Brussels last December to discuss post-pandemic spending. Another in-person summit, in Brussels, is planned later this month.

EU leaders appear keen to “try and convey a sense of normality, of slowly returning to normal”, according to Antonio Barroso, a political analyst at Teneo, a global advisory firm.

That is a key consideration for southern EU countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece, where tourism is an economic mainstay.

Despite a slow start to its inoculation drive, the EU this week passed the milestone of 150 million vaccinations and reckons it can reach what it calls “sufficient community immunity” in two months’ time.

The European Commission proposes relaxing restrictions on travel to the bloc this summer. Who is able to move around remains a sensitive question for Europeans, however, with pandemic improvements having been uneven across the continent, and many Europeans remaining subject to restrictions.

In a political nod to those concerns, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch prime minister

Mark Rutte will not travel to Portugal. And as a reminder of the risks, Maltese prime minister Robert Abela will not be attending because he is in quarantine after his wife tested positive on Wednesday.

Pandemic fundamentals remain unchanged: those attending the summit must show negative PCR tests for Covid-19, while social distancing and mask-wearing are required.

The summit will make a splash in the picturesque Atlantic coast city of Porto, with a population of just over 200,000. Most of the city’s hotels have been shut since last spring due to Covid-19, and local gripes about streets being overcrowded with tourists now seem a distant memory.

With the pandemic exposing inequalities and bringing greater hardship in the bloc, the talks in Porto will initially look at how to ensure EU citizens are guaranteed their rights in such areas as employment support, gender equality and social services.