Spain’s prime minister to ask parliament for lockdown extension until May 11

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will today submit to parliament legislation extending the country’s lockdown until 11 May.

Spain is one of the worst affected countries in Europe, with more than 170,000 infections and 20,000 deaths as of this week.

While some factories and transportation services have begun to reopen, attention now turns to long-term financial recovery. Although the EU has passed short-term stimulus packages worth half a trillion dollars, the hardest-hit countries are increasingly demanding a secondary collective EU fund of $1.63 trillion. Spain is set to propose the plan to an EU summit on Thursday.

Expect severe gridlock among EU nations in this week’s coming meetings as old divisions are rehashed. German and Dutch officials have argued that EU countries will benefit from good market conditions and are increasingly reluctant to move forward with further stimulus. Largely responsible is the notion that a collective bailout would be mostly financed by northern EU countries’ taxpayers, a situation almost certain to galvanise domestic support for anti-integrationist populist movements.

Many such groups, including Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, have already unleashed rhetoric condemning the proposal. If it is not passed, southern EU nations may face a debt overflow akin to that of Greece in the early 2010s.

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