The novel coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc around the world, as mankind’s vulnerability to an invisible foe has us scrambling to impose emergency measures.
Yet one silver lining is the reality that Covid-19 is forcing different sides of the political spectrum in more than one country to let go of their orthodoxies, work together, and find the consensus needed to tackle the outbreak.
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In late 2018, Belgium’s governing coalition collapsed. Elections in May 2019 did little to help matters, as the country’s elected parties – the centre-right N-VA and the centre-left Socialists – could not agree on how to share power.
Essentially, Belgium has been without a government for more than a year. But when faced with the problem of the new coronavirus outbreak, Belgium’s politicians decided they needed to work together.
“Continuing political squabbling was considered unacceptable in terms of corona urgency,” Marc Reynebeau, a Belgian journalist who has followed the situation closely, told me.
Warring political parties came together and decided to equip an emergency government with the powers needed to enact necessary measures to counter the spread of the virus.
Caretaker prime minister, Sophie Wilmès, will head the emergency government which has just one job: battle the coronavirus. This single mandate has prompted some observers to call it the “anti-corona” government. One of the government’s first acts was to approve the allocation of up to €10 billion to support the country’s unemployed workers and others being harmed by Covid-19.
Across Europe fiscal conservatives are embracing spending
Far from being an outlier, Belgium’s social and economic protection plans mirror what is happening elsewhere in Europe. We are seeing similar acts of cooperation, as rivals put aside differences to work together in the face of the viral outbreak.
In the Netherlands, after Bruno Bruins, the minister in charge of the country’s coronavirus response, collapsed from exhaustion during a parliamentary debate – before resigning the following day – the ruling centre-right government decided to tap someone from the centre-left to replace him – Martin van Rijn.
“The crisis is so big that party colour is irrelevant,” Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said, welcoming the former Labour minister aboard.
In the UK, the country may be polarised by Brexit and a series of contentious elections, but the major parties were able to come together and enact emergency legislation to give Boris Johnson’s government the power to ban large gatherings and quarantine coronavirus patients.
“The crisis is so big that party colour is irrelevant” - Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte
The ruling Conservative party was able to head off opposition from the Labour party by agreeing to a demand for the powers to be reviewed every six months. “We are glad that the government seems to have moved some way towards the compromise offered by Labour in the constitutional and public interest,” said Shami Chakrabarti, the shadow attorney general.
The Tories have laid out a plan to cover 80% of salaries of employees unable to work during the pandemic – a plan that only a few weeks ago would have been unthinkable for a party ruled for decades by free market dogma.
Then there is Angela Merkel. Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic chancellor has, at least temporarily, abandoned the austerity rules that limited public spending. This move may well have impacts beyond Germany itself, as it could provide “political cover for other eurozone nations to proceed with more aggressive government spending packages without being subject to the usual austerity-laden strictures imposed by Brussels,” Marshall Auerback, a scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, points out.
Across Europe, it appears that conservative governments who emphasised fiscal restraint have come to embrace leftist policies to respond to the crisis, forging consensus with their erstwhile progressive opponents.
The desire to cooperate is matched by that to consolidate power
Of course, as with every silver lining, there is also a darker cloud. Some leaders are using the outbreak as a justification to consolidate power.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is known for his authoritarianism, has managed to consolidate power as the parliament – which is controlled by his party – voted through a bill that will stop elections, giving Orbán the right to rule by decree indefinitely.
Elsewhere, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu not only holds on to power despite corruption charges, but manages to use fear of the coronavirus to extend his powers; Russia’s Vladimir Putin is rolling out an extensive facial recognition system, and at the end of March, Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte was granted new powers that his critics have condemned stating that "existing powers are already being abused".
A new American economic consensus?
In the US, market libertarianism – the idea that the free market, not government, should take care of all essential needs – has been the reigning economic philosophy ever since the election of president Ronald Reagan in 1980, who famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
US policymakers, particularly in the Republican Party, emphasise the value of free markets and deregulation; their policy approach typically consists of cutting taxes, reducing spending, and eliminating regulations. The Democratic Party has more leftwing members who advocate for higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, and greater spending on social problems – although concern about budget deficits remains a major tenet of the Democratic Party’s beliefs as well.
Suddenly, Republicans and Democrats are both pushing for bigger spending to protect the public’s health
Particularly since the Obama era, these two parties have not agreed on any big economic questions, and market libertarianism has been the main outcome – with the US remaining the only industrialised country without universal health care, and one of the few countries on earth that doesn’t guarantee some form of paid sick leave and family leave to its workforce.
But the crisis the coronavirus pandemic has brought to US shores has pushed both major parties to re-examine their commitment to market libertarianism. Suddenly, Republicans and Democrats are pushing for bigger spending to protect the public’s health and pocketbook, while advocating for regulations that will protect workers as the economy is battered by the virus.
President Donald Trump, who had warned during his State of the Union address in early February that “socialism destroys nations”, by mid-March was instructing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to suspend all foreclosures and evictions through the month of April – responding to the plight of an increasing number of workers who have lost jobs and billable hours due to coronavirus-related shutdowns.
Trump’s government has also suspended student loan payments for at least 60 days. At the state level, other Republicans are following suit. Florida senator Rick Scott who, like Trump, had hoped to strike fear into the heart of the Republican base by saying that “Democrats want to bring socialism to our country,” has, for his part, called for a 60-day suspension of rent, mortgage, and utility payments for most American workers.
Some Democrats, too, are rethinking their economic orthodoxy. Former Clinton and Obama economic adviser Larry Summers – a free trader who once compared opponents of outsourcing to “Luddites” – has been wondering out loud why the US can’t just produce the medical supplies it badly needs itself.
Members of both major parties first worked together to pass legislation that made testing for the virus free, while requiring companies to provide paid sick leave for their staff who have been impacted by the disease.
Dean Baker, a heterodox economist who has long been a critic of the economic establishment, told me that “concerns about budget deficits seem to have disappeared” in the face of the substantial emergency spending proposals circulating on Capitol Hill.
Baker did note, however, that some tenets of American economic orthodoxy seem to be completely change resistant, such as the idea that individuals should bear the cost of healthcare rather than the government. “Even the [Democrats] are not pushing for free treatment,” he pointed out.
In the US we may well see people who are showing Covid-19 symptoms choosing not to get tested for fear of having to face large bills for treatment. But it is nevertheless remarkable that a substantial number of blue and red lawmakers ended their philosophical objection to simply writing federal checks to workers – a long-time taboo in US politics.
On the left, Bernie Sanders has proposed giving Americans $2,000 every month; on the right, Mitt Romney – who famously lost his presidential race after complaining that 47% of Americans are “dependent upon the government” – called for a $1,000 payment to all Americans.
During the debate over cash transfers, Republican senator Mitch McConnell first proposed that low-income Americans with lower tax liabilities would receive smaller amounts. Surprisingly, the proposal yielded objections not just from liberals and Democrats, but from his own party as well. Fellow Republican senator Josh Hawley introduced an amendment to strike the means-testing from the legislation, and McConnell ended up removing it on his own. In the end, Congress voted 96-0 to agree on a bill that would send substantial cash payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits for those out of work for the next few months, and deliver substantial sums of aid to businesses.
This new legislation has faced some serious criticism – with many worried that the funding it has allotted for aid to businesses comes with few strings attached – but it is still remarkable how quickly bipartisan support has been secured in a body known to suffer from gridlock. As professor in public policy Michael Lind put it: "Fear of bankruptcy and fear of dying are very powerful incentives for cooperation."
Will this appetite for consensus last?
In a crisis people tend to work together because they scarcely have any other choice. But when that crisis ends, we often go back to old animosities. This fear of a return to old conflicts and camps was on the minds of many of the people I interviewed.
On the sudden embrace of cash transfers and sick leave Lind warned: “I think you have to be careful that you don’t assume that things now are going to be permanent."
“If [we] have a miracle treatment in six weeks, we [may] just revert back to the old ideologies and it’s seen as a one-time fluke.”
RJ Eskow, a radio host and former adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, agrees with Lind, citing past experiences: “We thought things would change permanently after the 2008 crisis. But our broken political and media ecosystems gave everyone permission to back away from that.”
Jerome Sheridan, a Belgian affairs expert at the American University, is also pessimistic about the prospect of Belgium’s cooperation on the coronavirus leading to longer-term political cooperation: “Belgium is finding temporary solutions to a major crisis at this moment in time, but I do not see any way forward for creating a long-term consensus."
According to Lind any durable political consensus relies on building cooperation that creates its own constituencies, which in turn push for future collaboration. “There’s something in political science called policy feedback theory: when you create a programme that mobilises a great number of voters to defend it in the future, then it may very well be permanent. So the reason the New Deal lasted was not the temporary work relief programmes," Lind says. "What lasted were farm subsidies, trade unions, and social security – all of which mobilised millions of voters who had a stake in [these] new programmes. If millions of voters will fight for these emergency measures at the polls, then you’re likely to get lasting change.”
Those final words are a challenge to everyone who wants to see the fruit of this crisis-born consensus remain: don’t just applaud it or welcome it when all seems lost. Demand it of your leaders when all seems right in the world again.
Dig deeper
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