Strained relationship: How Heiko Maas Italian trust fights

The German foreign Minister, holding just six hours in the Italian capital, but he finds at least four occasions, to be provided at the beginning of the Corona-crisis battered German-Italian relations with the new healing envelopes. Heiko Maas visited those Roman infection clinic, which began in February as the first in the country in the fight against the Coronavirus. He is well informed in the headquarters of the EU-Mediterranean-Mission Irini, which controls the Monitoring of the Libyan arms embargo and currently the most important common foreign policy projects of both countries.

John Age

Political correspondent in Berlin.

the Maas the close cooperation with his Italian colleague Luigi Di Maio – praises with which he denies the entire program of the day together. And he says, finally, in the Italian television sets, such as that Italy had become after the Brexit more important for Europe – and that Germany had done at the conception of the EU reconstruction funds, the European billion of aid, which will largely be as a grant, "a big step on Italy".

In the days before Germany holds the six – month presidency of the EU and, therefore, the responsibility for the economic and political reconstruction of Europe after the Corona-crisis – to be trying Maas, a pre-command of the normalization. He travels this Tuesday to Spain and has coordinated then in the circle of the powerful EU member States, i.e. Poland and France, with the Netherlands and Austria, two countries of the "Thrifty four", which is not with the current design of the EU reconstruction funds yet to agree. Maas asserts in Rome, Germany will do everything in order to lead in July, so within four weeks after the beginning of the presidency, all of the financial matters agreement, to agree on both the next Seven-year EU budget, as well as the terms and conditions of up to 750 billion Euro reconstruction programme in all 27 member countries.

He was "absolutely sure that we will reach an agreement within the European Union". And on the Italian concerns that the establishment of funds to hard, as degrading the perceived conditions might be linked, says Maas, there would be "Conditionality", but they would be in no way compare with those that were applied in relation to Greece in the financial crisis.