Can economic deal help EU weather coronavirus crisis?

EUROPEAN Union presidents and prime ministers are seeking to ratify in coming days a deal agreed by finance ministers last Thursday for a 500-billion-euro package to combat the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis. Yet, while this has been called the "most important economic plan" in EU history, the political impact of the pandemic continues to rock the bloc in what could yet be an existential challenge.

In the past few weeks, the coronavirus outbreak has already wreaked havoc across much of the continent, which has suffered more than 65 per cent of the known deaths worldwide attributable to the virus. The scale of the damage has exacerbated the bloc's vulnerabilities that in the past decade have been driven by the eurozone crisis, an influx of migrants, and growing Euroscepticism, including Brexit - far from French political visionary Jean Monnet's dream that the union would be "forged in crises", it has been weakened.

Moreover, the last month of coronavirus chaos has seen many of the EU-27 act alone and in their own interests, including intensification of a longstanding economic schism between several southern European states, especially Italy and Spain, which have been worst hit in Europe by the health emergency, and a number of northern countries, especially the Netherlands. On Thursday, before the economic deal was agreed later that day, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte asserted that Europe's leaders were "facing an appointment with history", and that "if we do not seize the opportunity to put new life into the European project, the risk of failure is real".