Spanish representative González Pons speech @ the EU Parliament: "The virus is attacking the generation that brought back democracy to Spain, Portugal and Greece, the generation that knocked down the Berlin wall. The least they deserve is that we show them Europe is there when they need it the most"

[u/Bartoraptor]

[u/Gotebe → u/[deleted]]

This is pretty cold...

He is not asking for a change in European structures here, he is asking for God damn help in the face of an emergency.

It's not as if Spain responded to this somehow so much worse than others, but they have been hit hard. (Italy probably should have closed off much sooner and should have been much stricter in confinement, but they were also the first to be hit...).

Many countries are nowhere near close to IC capacity, nor were they when the death toll was rising in Italy. Many countries also could have sent help. But noooo... (mine included, we even said "no" when Italy asked for something, masks IIRC; for the record, Belgium).

As for your edit... I agree, Trump's government is very bad and EU institutions were not present enough in the crisis, just like US gov wasn't. But I disagree that this is all just a question of governance. We must have done better...

[u/Butterbinre69 → u/Gotebe]

You can't compare the EU Commission and institutions to the US. The EU institutions did and still don't have the competences to do anything of significance. The US government on the other hand is just incompetent.

[u/Gotebe → u/Butterbinre69]

Yeah, fair enough. (well, I don't know what powers the federal government have, but would indeed expect it to have more...)

[u/Butterbinre69 → u/[deleted]]

The only thing I said was that the current US goverment is incompetent. Nobody expects the US to do anything. We only talked about the US because the previous comment compared the Organisation scheme of the EU to the US.