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METERItalian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fueled the anti-German controversies over the purchase of vaccines in one sentence. Until now, they had spawned mostly right-wing media and politicians, with scathing reports about the German government buying 30 million doses of vaccines from Biontech and its partner Pfizer. “Berlin is cheating the EU, it doesn’t give a damn about the pact and buying 30 million doses of vaccine for the Germans,” wrote the right-wing newspaper La Verità.
Tobias Piller
Economic Correspondent for Italy and Greece based in Rome.
The newspaper “Libero” is located on the same spectrum, with Tuesday’s headline: “Berlin puts us in”, and also shows a photo montage with the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp and the title “The vaccine liberates” mounted on the door. Under this photomontage was an article on vaccinators, but the illustration also matched the opposite page on alleged German pettiness.
The controversy, which had heated up for days in the field of the right, finally inspired the local Rome newspaper “Messaggero” to launch a bellicose comment on the front page: “Angela Merkel takes an additional 30 million doses of vaccine with a war flash of lightning”.
European agreements violated?
Italian critics accuse the German government of violating agreements that coronavirus vaccines will be procured jointly through the European Union. Because the initiative for the joint purchase came from Germany, France, the Netherlands and then also Italy, the Germans are also supposed to be hypocrites.
The Italian Prime Minister endorsed these interpretations at his official press conference at the end of the year. He didn’t need any controversial tone for this. Law professor Giuseppe Conte knows how to sharpen acrid criticism with sober words. When asked about Germany’s behavior, the prime minister said it was a joint decision to join forces for the supply of vaccines at the EU level. Italy is already receiving hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines through the EU and will make surplus vaccines available to the poorest countries. Italy did not order anything on its own. “Italy did not do that because article 7 of the treaty prohibits direct supplies. Point”.
From the German point of view, the Italian prime minister knowingly spoke a half-truth. On Wednesday morning, apparently before the press conference, his Health Minister Roberto Speranza called his German ministerial colleague Jens Spahn (CDU) and confronted him. Spahn explained his position shortly before the federal press conference, following a question from the Italian news agency Ansa.
Spahn: purchase negotiations concluded
The EU deal, as Spahn said, referred to a round of purchase negotiations that had been concluded long ago. After that, everyone is free to place additional orders. Only deliveries to the EU, with vaccines distributed proportionally to all member countries, should not be affected by this. The legal texts translated into Italian by the European Union clearly use the Italian term for a procurement procedure (“appalto”) and not for a group of purchases.
