Europe’s Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods need a European Union that sticks to its principles as it battles the coronavirus pandemic.

Europe is going through one of its biggest challenges since World War II. That’s what Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said in a rare state-of-the nation address on 18 March. At first, she mentioned how 1989 had been so monumental for Germany. But then she paused. The country, she said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic, was going through a crisis. ‘The situation is serious. Take it seriously,’ Merkel pleaded. ‘Since German unification, no, since the Second World War, there has been no challenge to our nation that has demanded such a degree of common and united action,’ she added.

Before her speech, much of Europe went into lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Since then, economies have almost come to a standstill. The EU’s internal borders have been closed. Airports have become eerily empty. In many countries, children can no longer attend school. Restaurants, bars, and cafés remain shut in many places.

After a slow start, the EU’s institutions and member states are now doing as much as they can to provide financial help to businesses, individuals, and various sectors of the economy. When the virus has gone or is contained, leaders hope such support will allow economies to revive quickly. But economists point out that growth will be very slow to pick up and high unemployment will persist in many countries.

The EU’s coronavirus condition has big implications for Europe’s Eastern and Southern neighbours. From investment and trade to labour flows and migration, these countries’ economies have become increasingly tied to the EU. Their stability and ability to cope with the pandemic depends both on their own leaders and on the EU’s policies towards them.

Even though Europe is preoccupied with tackling the virus, it cannot afford to neglect its neighbours. Recovery in these regions will be long. Europe’s neighbours are going to require significant levels of economic help from international financial institutions. And that should include funding for healthcare systems that have suffered underinvestment.

Apart from such help, it is crucial that the EU and its member states speak out against governments that use the virus to accrue more powers at the expense of parliaments, the rule of law, and civil society—both inside the bloc and beyond.

The EU’s response to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s decision to suspend the Hungarian parliament was tepid, to say the least. Orbán insisted that once the virus was over, the emergency powers he had introduced would be lifted. But a return to the status quo ante cannot be taken for granted. And besides, Orbán was already chiselling away at the rule of law, independent media, and NGOs before the pandemic struck.

In Poland, pressure from civil society and the opposition, as well as criticism from the EU, forced the governing Law and Justice party to postpone until July the presidential election that was due to be held on 10 May. It was hard to see how the election campaign would have been fair given that the country was in lockdown. The Polish case shows the resilience of civil society—for now.

Nor can the EU afford to put human rights on the back burner. Take the case of Shady Habash, a young Egyptian film-maker who died earlier in May. He had been imprisoned two years ago in a notorious maximum-security complex for mocking Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a music video. Habash had appealed for help. In a letter from prison posted on Facebook in October 2019, he wrote, ‘Prison doesn’t kill, loneliness does.’ It was, he added, a struggle to ‘stop yourself going mad or dying slowly because you’ve been thrown in a room two years ago and forgotten’.

In April 2020, Sisi released 4,000 prisoners, but political activists, lawyers, writers, and critics of his regime remain behind bars. It’s a similar situation in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan uses the pandemic to muzzle his critics.

No experts can be sure how long this pandemic will last. What is clear is that a way of life that was taken for granted inside and outside the EU has, for the moment, been suspended or turned upside down. That doesn’t mean that democracy has to be put on hold. Indeed, for governments to suspend the rule of law, marginalise civil society, and harass opposition parties in the name of containing the pandemic would make values and principles the victims of this virus. All the more reason for the EU to know what is at stake now and in the post-coronavirus era.