Emmanuel Macron dissociates himself from Mario Draghi. “We do not plan to impose tests within the EU, because we care about the proper functioning of our common space and because, from the moment a variant is present in this or that EU country, it spreads very quickly in the others”, underlines the French president, at a press conference in Brussels at the end of the European Council. «The majority of the movements are made by cross-border workers – he continues – who are exempt from this measure. We will not put PCR tests on other EU countries, we will impose them on third countries once they are classified in the categories that require them ».
The European situation is therefore not fully aligned with the measure decided by Draghi for Italy, and at least Paris has doubts that the spirit of the decision is far from the European ideal, or at least shows to believe it. «Faced with the variants of the virus – Macron tweeted – we must continue to act as Europeans. People who have been vaccinated will not have to take tests to travel between member countries of the European Union ”.
The tweet surprised, as from yesterday’s European Council, where the decision of the countries that impose the buffer (Italy, Greece, Ireland and Portugal) was also discussed, only a declaration came out regarding the restrictions decided by individual countries that “They must not undermine the proper functioning of the internal market or disproportionately hinder freedom of movement”. France has chosen to ask for the swab followed by a mandatory quarantine only for people returning from Great Britain, the neighboring country with the highest prevalence of the Omicron variant. Beyond the symbolic reasons with which Macron explains the choice not to impose the same obligations on vaccinated and unvaccinated, the French president – transpires from his entourage – believes that the swabs at the internal borders of the EU have “very little effectiveness”, as the great part of the trips inside the EU are made these days by cross-border workers. However, they are exempt from the daily buffer. Leaving the European Council, Macron explained that “when this or that variant is present in one EU country, it then spreads to others”.