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The differences are staggering: Austria and Switzerland opt for a more liberal crown policy. Despite a similar situation, Germany may even want to tighten its comparatively very rigid restrictions again, as reported before the Crown summit in Berlin.
According to a survey, only 30 percent of Germans want to further toughen the measures, 23 percent want to keep them and 37 percent want to relax or end them.
In most continental European countries, a third wave of corona infections has been building up for a few weeks. At the same time, fatigue in the crown is increasing throughout Europe and there are protests against the prevailing restrictions. The responses that affected countries find to this vary and sometimes even contradict each other. While signs in Germany already point to tightening the crown’s measures, Austria and Switzerland are sticking to their comparatively more flexible pandemic management for the time being or even softening them.
In Switzerland, the Federal Council again allowed private meetings with up to ten people (instead of the previous five) indoors starting Monday, but for the time being refrained from discussing additional opening steps. The trade has been open since March 1, but because restaurants and bars are still closed and a home office is mandatory, Swiss trade associations and civic politicians reacted angrily. In an open letter, they demand that the government and administration do much more investigative efforts to relax existing restrictions. By the end of June, all citizens should have had the opportunity to be vaccinated; Vaccinated individuals should have greater freedom and a nationally coordinated digital Corona passport should be available by early June at the latest.
Austria wants to accept higher case numbers
Despite the comparatively high number of cases in Austria (Sunday the 7-day incidence was 236 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants, in Switzerland it was around 115 and in Germany it was 104) Vienna is sticking to its corona policy more liberal at the moment. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) said on a short visit to Berlin late last week that his government had decided to accept a greater number of cases and give citizens more freedom. On the contrary, he called on the hesitant German government to fully restore freedom of travel. Austria is primarily concerned with the flow of tourists. Up to 15 percent of the country’s economic production depends on tourism.
After several lockdowns, Vienna allowed wide easing in early February: schools are open again for face-to-face teaching, retail sales are allowed, and even so-called body-friendly services (as in Switzerland). In return, an extensive testing program is carried out. In schools, children and young people are tested at least once a week. Anyone who wants to go to a hairdresser or a massage needs a negative certificate. With the exception of Graubünden and Basel-Land, the cantons of Switzerland have so far had difficulties implementing broad-based tests.
The Austrian federal government wants to discuss more steps on Monday. Chancellor Kurz and Health Minister Rudolf Anschober (Greens) advocate regional access “including an emergency brake” for particularly affected areas. Several federal states, including Tirol and Vienna, urged the federal government to open the outdoor areas to the catering trade over the weekend.
Germany has the strictest regulations
The German government will also meet again on Monday for consultations with the prime ministers of the federal states. Despite the big protests over the weekend, there is no longer talk of easing in Germany. The country has imposed the toughest restrictions. On a scale from 0 (easy) to 100 (strict) calculated by the University of Oxford, Germany has 78, Austria 75 and Switzerland 60.
Over the weekend, however, the number of votes in Germany who, like SPD co-chair Saskia Esken, demanded a return to the hard lockdown. Esken’s friend from the party, Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also warned Germans not to travel during the Easter holidays: “We simply cannot afford that in the current infection situation.” Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) was heading in the same direction on Sunday. With the growing number of cases today, caution is absolutely necessary.
20,000 people protested against Corona’s restrictions in Kassel.
In a draft resolution of the SPD for the round of federal and state governments, which circulated in Berlin over the weekend, there is talk of an extension of the existing blockade until well into April. The “strong infection rate and exponential dynamics”, in particular due to the mutation of the now dominant British virus, did not allow for anything else. Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) had already hinted on Friday that “the emergency brake should be used.”
Individual federal states like Hamburg have already attracted it. Others, such as North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg, which have higher incidence values, doubt. Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania actively promote Easter tourists. It could not be, politicians from coastal countries argued, that Germans should fly to Mallorca, but they should not be allowed to spend “low contact” holidays in their own country.
In a current opinion poll, only 30 percent of Germans were in favor of expanding crown-related restrictions again. 23 percent were in favor of maintaining the current measures. 22 percent wanted relaxation, 15 percent the end of all restrictions. On Saturday there was an unauthorized large-scale demonstration of the “lateral thinking” movement in Kassel in the face of violent unrest. The only concession to weary citizens of the Crown is in the German resolution document for Monday’s federal-state round of “temporary model projects” in which “individual areas of public life could be opened up with strict protective measures. and a concept of proof ”.
You can contact the Berlin political correspondent Christoph Prantner Twitter Consequences.
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