Editorial Ta Nea: New Deal

It is always good not to have great expectations when it comes to EU summits, especially one like today’s, where leaders will not have personal contact but instead will slug it out via teleconference due to the pandemic crisis.

Yet it is precisely this public health crisis that raises the bar for all involved.

It mandates that a debate should begin on how to redesign the EU’s economy.

The reason is simple. The system designed after WWII has reached its limit.

If this is a war that we are witnessing then the end cannot but be accompanied by a new beginning, which is to say a new economic model.

Can the foundations of a new economic paradigm be laid without a new agreement, without a sort of New Deal such as that adopted by FDR which pulled the US and by extension the global economy out of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Europe stands divided and the current crisis is intensely testing its endurance and cohesion.

Yet the EU is too great an economic power not to provide its own answers to the enormous challenges that are already resulting from this war.

Seventy-five years ago Europe passed the baton of world hegemony, but the post-war world has come to an end and the EU cannot afford to act like a mere bystander.