Brexit worse than virus?

 Unusual Euro gloom in the Graun, lightened only at the end with a bit of EU schadenfreude:

Coronavirus threatens future of eurozone, Brussels warns

Pandemic risks exacerbating economic and social divisions between countries

The economic output of the Eurozone is likely to shrink by a record 7.75% in 2020 and rebound by just 6.25% in 2021, with unemployment rising from 7.5% in 2019 to 9.5%....Greece’s gross domestic product – is forecast to shrink the most, by 9.7%, owing to the closure of its tourist industry. GDP in Italy and Spain are is expected to contract by 9.5% and 9.4% respectively...Germany is expected to have a far less dramatic contraction than most, and recover more swiftly even though the economic downturn (6.5%) is still expected to be the country’s deepest since the second world war...Austria, Croatia Slovakia and Poland are the only other countries expected to return to 2019 levels of economic productivity by the end of 2021...“Such divergence poses a threat to the single market and the euro area – yet it can be mitigated through decisive, joint European action,” Gentiloni said.

 Yet there is some bitter cheer for Those Who Drip On and On:

The commission said the UK economy was expected to shrink by 8.3% by the end of the year, as a result of lockdown measures, with investment down 14% and unemployment doubling...Only the GDPs of Greece, Italy, Spain and Croatia are expected to contract more than the UK’s....the end of the transition period would “dampen economic growth, even if a free trade agreement between the EU and the UK was concluded.

Naturally:

The UK would be expected to grow by 6% next year, according to the commission, if the status quo in terms of trading relations was maintained.

Elsewhere, even T Garton-Ash seems a tad worried that the Dream might be over. There are good and bad scenarios (what else would we expect from liberals?) :

On the one hand:

the EU, which earlier this week convened an international meeting to raise funds for fighting Covid-19, becomes a prime mover of global collective action.

 But, on the other, a nightmare future:

In Europe, wealthy northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands simply don’t show the necessary degree of solidarity with the battered economies of south European eurozone members. Instead, they use the EU’s crisis-justified suspension of limits on state aid to pump public funds into their key industries, and the gulf between northern and southern Eurozone states grows wider. In a couple of years’ time, a populist like Matteo Salvini, or someone even worse (yes, it’s possible), gains power in an Italy where public debt is now about 160% of GDP and blames all the country’s woes on a lack of north European solidarity....Meanwhile, in the eastern half of the continent, Hungary remains a dictatorship, with Viktor Orbán’s temporary emergency powers mysteriously becoming permanent.

The EU, no longer a community of democracies, and torn along both its north-south and east-west axes, gradually weakens and disintegrates. Left to their own devices, its member states fail to provide adequate job prospects, social security and an ecologically sustainable future for their younger citizens. And so, as already shockingly foreshadowed in our poll, they turn to authoritarian solutions. Europe looks ever less to the US, ever more to China.

  And there is a chance for reader comments/cheap copy as ever:

we’ve also set up a self-interview facility for anyone with 10 minutes to spare to tell us your best and worst European moments, and your hopes for Europe in 2030. Thus far, the fall of the Berlin Wall has been the most widely mentioned formative moment and Brexit the top-scoring worst moment. But maybe this coronavirus moment will overtake them both.