EU Leaders Seal the Deal on $2.1 Trillion Coronavirus Recovery Fund

BRUSSELS, KOMPAS.com — Exhausted European Union leaders have come to an agreement to the bloc’s unprecedented €1.8 trillion ($2.1 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund on Tuesday.

The agreement marks the longest EU summit ever after four days and nights of negotiations and talks.

The 27 EU leaders demonstrated their commitment to providing European aid for member states that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Covid-19 virus has claimed the lives of 135,000 in the EU.

Read also: Deadlocked EU Leaders Inch Closer to an Agreement for Coronavirus Recovery Fund

The venue for the EU summit was complete hygienic gel everywhere while European Leaders donned masks.

This has become a reminder of the deadly health and economic risks the Covid-19 virus poses.

“Extraordinary events, and this is the pandemic that has reached us all, also require extraordinary new methods,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

To confront the biggest recession in its history, the EU will establish a 750 billion-euro coronavirus fund, partly based on common borrowing, to be sent as loans and grants to the hardest-hit countries.

That is in addition to the agreement on the seven-year, 1 trillion-euro EU budget that leaders had been haggling over for months even before the pandemic.

Read also: Down to the Wire as EU Leaders Discuss Coronavirus Recovery Fund

“The consequences will be historic," French President Emmanuel Macron said. “We have created a possibility of taking up loans together, of setting up a recovery fund in the spirit of solidarity," a sense of sharing debt that would have been unthinkable not so long ago.

Merkel said, “We have laid the financial foundations for the EU for the next seven years and came up with a response to this arguably biggest crisis of the European Union."

Despite Macron and Merkel negotiating as the closest of partners, the traditionally powerful Franco-German alliance struggled for days to get the quarreling nations in line.

But, even walking out of a negotiating session in protest together over the weekend, the two leaders bided their time and played their cards right in the end.