“impossible to be more optimistic than [António] Costa,” Portugal’s president once said about his country’s irrepressible prime minister. Yet on March 26th Mr Costa’s bonhomie was nowhere to be seen.
Yet the euro zone remains divided along familiar lines. An all-night session of finance ministers on April 7th-8th failed to reach agreement after the Italians and Dutch squabbled over debt mutualisation and other matters. A smaller suite of measures may yet be signed off. These include an expansion of European Investment Bank private-sector loans,financial support for national wage-subsidy schemes, and perhaps credit lines from the European Stability Mechanism , the euro zone’s bail-out fund.
A more worrying difference is political. In Italy, which sits on a debt pile of over €2.5trn, Euroscepticism had emerged as a powerful force even before the corona crisis—channelled largely through Matteo Salvini, a former deputy prime minister who leads the hard-right Northern League. In early April one poll found that 53% of Italians were ready to leave the euro or. This has forced Giuseppe Conte, the non-partisan prime minister, to toughen his line, describing theas “utterly inadequate”.