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meIt was eight long hours and a half that Angela Merkel spent in front of the video screen in a small room of the Berlin Chancellery. The talks were “effective” and “compressed,” the foreign minister said Thursday night after the summit conference with EU heads of government. There were lights and shadows for Merkel. But it also experienced heated debates.
What went well for Merkel? She was the only EU politician new US President Joe Biden mentioned by name during his 30-minute video appearance from 8.45pm, and even three times. He praised her as a “European leader”. The Chancellor is one of the few European politicians Biden knows from his time as Vice President of the United States under Obama. Merkel values Biden immensely. The chancellor did not mention Biden’s affectionate comments at the press conference with a single word.
He simply said soberly about the conversation with the man in the White House: “It was a first meeting, a gesture that was very important and means that we are talking more closely again.” And then Merkel added: “There is a crowd.” of similarities that we want to cultivate more ”. In his short statement, Biden offered Europeans cooperation in the fight against industrial espionage by the Chinese and Beijing’s abuse of Uighurs, but also close coordination on climate change and the fight against Covid – 19.
Then Biden said, “My uncle was in Europe during World War II.” It was a subtle message. It said: My family also fought for the freedom of Europeans. And Biden had a request to the President of the EU Council, Charles Michel. You shouldn’t always like “Mr. Talk to the President.” “I’m Joe,” Biden said.
But Merkel didn’t just like Biden’s looks. In the run-up to the summit, he was also able to ensure that the European Union continues and even wants to intensify the dialogue with Turkey, despite the fact that in some cases there are considerable differences. Merkel is the most important defender of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the EU; The same applies, by the way, to the Chinese ruler, President Xi Jinping, to whom the German chancellor reaches out again and again, as was the case recently. with the controversial investment agreement between the EU and China.
The agreement with Beijing reached Berlin in late December last year, a day before New Year’s Eve. “In view of the differences of opinion that exist, and in some cases also the deep differences of opinion, we believe that silence is not yet an answer,” Merkel said, referring to Turkey. Rather, what is needed are “contacts with Turkey at all levels”. The EU is now offering Turkey another expansion of the customs union and possibly even a gradual liberalization of visas. But that also depends on how “detente develops in the eastern Mediterranean,” Merkel said. It alluded to the withdrawal of Turkish ships from Cyprus and Greece, which explored gas reserves for months and thus provoked Athens and Nicosia.
After the March 2016 EU-Turkey deal, the “bosses” nodded in approval of the renewed rapprochement with Ankara surprisingly quickly and quietly. Merkel was satisfied.
However, before that, shortly after three in the afternoon on Thursday, the chancellor had to experience how six EU states thwarted her plans. The heads of government of these countries simply canceled the dramaturgy of the summit of the president of the EU Council, Michel, which was carefully choreographed and coordinated with Berlin. That doesn’t happen very often in the Brussels engine room. But it was about a very emotional issue: the fair distribution of vaccines within the EU. In any case, Europeans have very few vaccines available. It was a matter of principle that touched the heart of the Union. It was about rich and poor, fair and unfair, and it was about solidarity between partners. Diplomats described the mood as “irritable” at times. The debate lasted hours.
The problem: EU governments had firmly agreed in January that vaccines should be delivered at the same time and proportionally based on population size. According to Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, this was simply changed by a decision of senior national health officials in the so-called EU steering committee.
The result: Malta, for example, receives three times more vaccinations than Bulgaria in the first half of the year and will therefore be able to vaccinate its own population much earlier. According to internal lists, Denmark and Germany are also clearly among the vaccine winners. In addition to Austria, ten days ago the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Latvia also called for a “correction mechanism” for a solidarity-based vaccine distribution. Merkel was angry about this, as were the heads of government of the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. The public debate was feared to “damage the integrity of the distribution mechanism and the vaccination process,” as the German EU ambassador, Michael Clauss, wrote in a report.
The background to the debate is that the poorest EU countries, in particular, asked for little or no more expensive vaccines from Moderna and Biontech / Pfizer and instead opted for the cheap AstraZeneca vaccine. As a result, batches were launched and countries such as Germany, Denmark and Malta took hold of them and thus were able to buy more vaccines from Moderna and Biontech / Pfizer than they really should have been allowed to. AstraZeneca now delivers far less than agreed in the contract, and this means poorer countries are falling further and further behind when it comes to vaccines. Obviously, these are months that are lost for them.
On Wednesday, Merkel indirectly sent a clear message to the affected states of Central and Eastern Europe: bad luck. The issue has no place at the summit. “If vaccine distribution is not going to be a topic for a summit, then what?” Kurz asked. European State Minister Michel Roth (SPD) had already announced on Wednesday on behalf of the German government that “there is currently no reason” to change anything in the distribution mechanism. According to Roth, Austria and the other countries, like all EU states, had the option of ordering vaccine quantities according to their population, but they did not. So did Charles Michel, the main organizer of the video summit.
Less than two hours after the video conference started, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, like Merkel and Kurz, a member of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), took the floor. He criticized the non-transparent agreements made by officials of the EU steering committee and threatened not to leave the summit until there was a satisfactory solution and “compensation” for what he considered the unfair distribution of vaccines. Several heads of government supported Plenkovic. But there were also contradictions, for example from Holland or Sweden.
In the end, there was a compromise that should ultimately lead to the necessary “correction mechanism” for vaccine distribution. Merkel replied briefly. In the final declaration of the summit it is now said that, in principle, it adheres to a distribution according to the population key (prorated allocation). However, in the coming weeks EU ambassadors will discuss how the additional ten million doses of vaccine organized by the EU Commission for the second quarter of 2021 will be distributed by Biontech / Pfizer “in a spirit of solidarity”.
In simple terms: only a part of these additional ten million doses of vaccine will be distributed proportionally according to the population to the 27 member countries, and another part, which should be less than five million doses of vaccine, will automatically go to the six disadvantaged countries. This would at least catch up a bit in terms of vaccination speed. When asked by reporters, Merkel said in a somewhat dismissive way that the whole company was a “relatively complicated task, squaring the circle”, but that is politics.
In addition to the intra-European distribution of vaccines, the export of vaccines to third countries was also on the agenda. The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, presented interesting figures. 77 million cans were exported from the EU to third countries, 21 million of them to the UK. In contrast, 88 million doses of vaccine produced in the EU have so far remained in the Union.
On the contrary, the EU has not received anything from third countries like the UK and the US That is why von der Leyen had already laid out plans for stricter export controls before the summit. EU governments approved the plans. Merkel said export restrictions would be “more likely” in the future if companies do not adhere to their agreements with the EU. This mainly refers to the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, which is said to have failed to deliver on its promises to the EU, but rather delivered the EU-produced vaccine to the UK preferably. However, there should be no blanket export ban.
