In the early days of the pandemic, it might have seemed the European Union’s dominant economic dogmas had been shaken. The crisis raised questions over everything from health care investment to intellectual property rights — and its drastic economic fallout led EU institutions to insist they could not just repeat the austerity recipes with which they had responded to the 2008 crisis.

But if there was some talk of “building back better,” it was far from clear what rethinking this would actually mean. This is particularly striking in the European country first hit by the pandemic, Italy. In a land whose once-mighty left has all but disappeared, the recent formation of a “national unity” government under former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi shows how neoliberal elites are acting to defend their own model.

Fabrizio Barca is coordinator of the ForumDD (Inequalities and Diversity Forum). He spoke to Fulvio Lorefice about the current disaster’s roots in the neoliberal policy of recent decades, the use of the crisis to strip back rights and regulations, and the possibility of reversing a decades-long rise in social inequality.