Angela Merkel: Coronavirus is Germany’s biggest postwar challenge

Chancellor urges an end to grocery hoarding and calls for solidarity.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel | Pool photo by Clemens Bilan via Getty Images

BERLIN — The coronavirus presents Germany’s greatest challenge in its postwar history, Chancellor Angela Merkel told viewers across the country in an unprecedented television address on Wednesday evening.

“Since German unification, no, since World War II, there has been no greater challenge to our country that depends so much on us acting together in solidarity,” Merkel said, according to a text released ahead of the transmission of her speech.

After two straight evenings of press conferences used to unveil measures that effectively suspended public life in Germany to try to curb the spread of the virus, Merkel sought to appeal directly to the German public in her televised address.

She said a policy of trying to suppress the spread of the virus was the only option as long as there was no vaccine to prevent it.

“We have to limit the risk that we infect one another as much as we can,” Merkel said.

Merkel said the sweeping restrictions on public life had not been taken lightly. “For someone like me, for whom travel and freedom of movement were hard-won rights, such restrictions can only be justified in absolute necessity,” she said.

The government has called for all bars, restaurants, theaters and major events to close. Throughout this week, major German companies have also shuttered plants and told tens of thousands of staff to work from home.

The government has also pledged to provide a limitless fund to keep the economy afloat, whatever the price.

Merkel also urged Germans not to panic buy, reassuring them that grocery supplies would be available at all times.

“Hoarding, as though there are never going to be fresh supplies, is pointless and in the end shows a complete lack of solidarity,” she said.

While Merkel speaks directly to television audiences every new year, she has never held an extraordinary address, despite a chancellorship that has included the global financial crisis and the influx of more than a million refugees in 2015.

Her predecessors also used direct television addresses extremely rarely. Helmut Kohl spoke directly to a mass German audience in 1990 as the country moved to reunification. His successor, Gerhard Schröder, held a television address in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq War, using it as an opportunity to criticize U.S. plans for invasion.

According to latest official figures, Germany has reported 8,198 cases of COVID-19 to date.

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