LONDON — When the history of Boris Johnson’s premiership is written, keep an eye out for the second week of June 2020.

His government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic came under sustained criticism almost from the get-go. But this week key decisions were attacked more than ever before, former allies broke ranks to criticize Johnson’s leadership, and the full extent of the economic damage that the pandemic has wrought was revealed by jaw-dropping official statistics showing a 20 percent fall in GDP in April.

For good measure, the U.K. entered a new phase of an already fractious culture war, with tensions emerging over the meaning of the Black Lives Matter movement in a country still coming to terms with its own colonial history — encapsulated by the toppling of a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader, in the city of Bristol.

The U.K. prime minister’s week will taste all the more bitter for the fact he began the year on a high: fresh from a decisive election victory, his chief policy goal — Brexit — was legally enacted on January 31, and he was eyeing five uninterrupted years at the top, with the cushion of a big parliamentary majority.

Brexit did feature this week, when on Friday the U.K. formally confirmed it would not extend the post-Brexit transition period. It should have been a big moment. But it pales in significance compared to the tasks that lie ahead for the country and its prime minister.

The ‘big, big’ economic hit

Johnson described Friday morning’s figures from the Office for National Statistics — which show the U.K. economy contracted by a record 20.4 percent in April, the first full month of the lockdown that was introduced on March 23 — as an unsurprising sign of the “big, big economic knock-on effects” of the pandemic.

Not surprising, maybe, but the figures still had the power to shock. They came two days after the OECD said the U.K. was likely to be hardest-hit of the major economies, with a slump of 11.5 percent in 2020 (albeit only slightly worse off than neighbors France and Italy).

“The U.K. is heavily dependent on services, a very dynamic creative economy, we depend so much on human contact,” Johnson said Friday, but pledged: “Confidence will return and you will see a bounce back in the U.K.”

However, thoughts are already turning to the summer and autumn, when the U.K.’s successful — but eye-wateringly expensive — job retention scheme begins to wind up. The furlough scheme, which as of June 7 had seen 8.9 million jobs supported by the government at a cost of £19.6 billion, has so far been responsible for preventing a historic spike in unemployment to go with the GDP plunge. As it winds up, some experts forecast unemployment could approach or exceed 10 percent — levels not seen in the U.K. since the 1930s.

What’s more, the pandemic has highlighted deep inequalities in health and circumstances in the country, with figures also released Friday showing people in England’s poorest areas are more than twice as likely to have died from COVID-19 than in the richest areas. Economic turmoil won’t help.

Johnson has a big speech lined up in “the coming weeks” setting out his recovery strategy; a project that will now eclipse Brexit as the defining project of his premiership.

Decisions made

Before the economic figures, it was already a bad week for Johnson.

On Tuesday a plan to get primary schools fully open again before the summer had to be delayed till September, but worse was to come when on Wednesday, one of the government’s most influential advisers, Imperial College’s epidemic modeling expert Neil Ferguson, stated boldly that had the U.K. gone into lockdown just one week earlier — a decision that ultimately rested with Johnson — its coronavirus death toll (currently estimated at above 50,000) could have been halved.

Johnson said in response that it was “premature” to judge the rights and wrongs of decisions made, but many in Whitehall now consider a full public inquiry into the government’s handling of the crisis a near-inevitability at some point in the not-too distant future.

Throughout, Johnson has insisted his government has been “led by the science” and taken the “right decisions at the right time,” but senior figures concede things could have been done differently. Asked on Wednesday to name his biggest regrets, England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty said: “There’s a long list of things we need to look at very seriously,” but singled out the U.K.’s slowness to increase its testing capacity at the start of its outbreak.

Inquisitors are also looking closely at decisions taken with regard to care homes, where nearly a third of deaths in England and Wales have occurred, according to the most up-to-date ONS figures.

A National Audit Office report on Friday confirmed that 25,000 patients had been discharged from hospitals into care homes between March 17 and April 15, with no policy in place guaranteeing those people would be tested for COVID-19. Those with symptoms were prioritized for testing, but, said Jeremy Hunt, chair of the health committee and Johnson’s former leadership rival, it was “extraordinary we did not appear to consider risks of asymptomatic infection.”

‘Breaking with Boris’

The catalog of alleged shortcomings has led to unease among Johnson’s own troops, according to several reports.

Already shaken by the public backlash against Johnson’s chief aide Dominic Cummings after alleged breaches of lockdown rules, feeling among the Conservative faithful was incapsulated on Wednesday in an article in the New Statesman by the co-founder of the ConservativeHome website and a former adviser to Johnson, Tim Montgomerie.

It warned that discontent stems not just from policy errors, but from the perception of Johnson’s Downing Street as a closed shop, running things from the center under a “reign of terror” led by Cummings.

MPs “no longer believe in the prime minister in the way they did,” Montgomerie wrote. “They still want their faith to be restored, but does Johnson realise the scale of what will be required to ensure that? I hope so. I fear not.”

It’s not as bad as all that on the back benches, according to one senior MP and former Cabinet minister. “Boris is hugely popular and there’s a lot of understanding for the challenges he faces and his personal health issues recently,” the MP said, referring to Johnson’s own near-death experience with COVID-19.

Poll slump

But MPs — who have always regarded Johnson, foremost, as an election-winner — will be watching the polls closely.

The prime minister’s personal approval ratings have slipped from +22 in early May, shortly after his recovery from COVID-19, to -7 in a new YouGov poll which capped off Johnson’s rotten week.

That would be bad enough, but the prime minister’s worries are compounded by the fact the other guy is going in the opposite direction. Labour’s Keir Starmer scored +27 in the same poll, and in another poll, by Ipsos MORI published Friday, achieved +31, the best of any opposition leader since Tony Blair in the 1990s.

Boris Johnson still held a marginal lead in terms of the person the public think would make the most capable prime minister | Tolga Almen/AFP via Getty Images

The consolation for Johnson: He still held a marginal lead in terms of the person the public think would make the most capable prime minister, and the Conservatives’ poll lead over Labour remains intact (if a little narrower than it was in the days of former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn).

Johnson still enjoys the loyalty of his party and of many of those who put their faith in him to deliver Brexit — it’s far too soon to write him off. But this week showed how the narrative around his premiership has fundamentally changed.

Pulling a divided and traumatized country through the coronavirus recovery would challenge any prime minister — let alone one who many consider a divisive figure. This is now the task that will define whether Johnson can still be the history-making (for the right reasons) prime minister he always wanted to be — or whether his best days in office are already behind him.

Hungary faces a “moment of truth” with its pledge to revoke emergency rule later this month, European Commission Vice President VÄ›ra Jourová said.

Jourová made the remarks during an interview with POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast, in which she cited concerns about the rule of law in both Hungary and Poland.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has been widely criticized for taking on emergency powers that include rule by decree without a set time limit as part of its response to the coronavirus crisis.

The government has defended the emergency regime as necessary for dealing with an unprecedented crisis. Justice Minister Judit Varga announced last month that it would come to an end on June 20 as the coronavirus has receded.

But human rights activists have warned that the government plans legal changes that would make it easier to assume emergency powers in future.

Jourová, whose job as vice president for values and transparency includes responsibility for the rule of law, said it would be problematic if Hungary does not return to its previous legal order when emergency rule ends.

“This will be the moment of truth, [as to] whether the situation and the legal order and the balance of powers in Hungary will come back to the old normal … or there will be some remainders of the emergency regime, which we would see as a problem from the EU law point of view,” she said.

Jourová also expressed concern about the detention of two people in Hungary for Facebook posts critical of the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Both men were released after some hours and the cases against them were dropped. But Jourová, who was once placed in pre-trial detention over false accusations of fraud, said she knew first hand that such an experience can do great damage.

“I was really very unpleasantly surprised,” Jourová said of the detentions. “I myself experienced such a situation, and the detention and the police investigation — it’s a big blow to everybody, to his or her family, or to his or her professional career.”

She said the detentions could deter others from criticism, producing a “chilling effect,” not only on journalists but on the general public.

Jourová said the Commission could not take action in those cases as they were not “systemic.” But she said the Commission is still analyzing decrees issued by the government during emergency rule.

EU institutions have triggered so-called Article 7 censure proceedings against both Hungary and Poland, accusing them of putting the bloc’s core values at risk. Budapest and Warsaw have in turn accused the EU of unwarranted meddling in their domestic affairs.

In Poland’s case, the Commission’s concerns center on reforms to the judicial system that Brussels and many legal experts say undermine its independence.

Jourová said the Commission would continue with legal action against Poland over the changes. But she also held out the prospect of renewed dialogue with Warsaw after a presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for June 28.

“We have to start a new chapter of the dialogue after the Polish presidential elections. I do believe there will be a space and hopefully also goodwill from the Polish side to sit around the table,” she said.

“I would really like to hear that they recognize that there are things which the Commission has to address — that the Polish judges are also European judges.”

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron is under increasing pressure to address policing and race issues that have been crystallized in a series of protests and counter-protests in recent days.

On Friday, police officers took to the streets of Paris to denounce what they say is a lack of political support, days after thousands marched in the French capital against alleged police brutality and racial discrimination by law enforcement.

Anti-racism and police brutality protests are planned across several cities over the weekend, and Macron will address the nation on Sunday evening but, so far, his office has said only that there’s a possibility he might discuss the issue. The speech is mainly meant to take stock of how the country is doing a month after the coronavirus lockdown was gradually lifted, and to discuss the economic recovery plans.

Macron has so far resisted speaking publicly about the issues that invoke the country’s lighting rod colonial past, preferring instead to allow Interior Minister Christophe Castaner and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to take the lead.

Unlike other European leaders, he hasn’t commented publicly and directly on the death in the United States of unarmed black man George Floyd in police custody, which ignited a global protest movement and contributed to French protesters’ anger.

“President Macron must ensure that the police are respected.” — Fabien Vanhemelryck, secretary-general of police union Alliance

The country’s anti-police brutality movement also gained renewed traction over the past two weeks after the latest court-ordered medical report in the case of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who died in police custody in 2016, seemed to exonerate the police in his death.

On Monday, Castaner banned the use of chokeholds during arrests, and said that officers should be suspended for acts of racism, or “verified suspicion” of racism. He nevertheless also asserted security forces are not racist, as did Philippe on Tuesday, who reiterated support for the police and called their work “formidably difficult.”

The ban was more a gesture to calm public discontent over alleged police brutality and racism, than an overhaul of policing, given that police brutality issues in France have mainly been about ethnic profiling, the use of flash-balls against protesters and aggressive physical handling of suspects.

Nonetheless, it drew the ire of police unions, whose members are already reeling from spending more than a year policing weekly protest by the anti-government Yellow Jackets movement, and having to fight to keep state privileges that came under threat from Macron’s (now suspended) pension reform plan.

“President Macron must ensure that the police are respected,” Fabien Vanhemelryck, secretary-general of police union Alliance, said at the end of the protest Friday during which officers raised banners that said “no police, no peace.”

Thursday evening, French media reported that Castaner was considering easing the chokehold ban, to allow it in certain situations, after he met with police unions.

But current tensions also go beyond police brutality, and have sparked a renewed attempt to discuss the taboo issue of racial discrimination in French society toward citizens descended from immigrants from ex-colonies.

When he was running for president in 2017, Macron spoke up about racism and France’s difficult colonial past, going as far as calling colonialism “a crime against humanity,” a statement that provoked a firestorm.

Since taking office, he has been more cautious, though his party, La République en Marche, paid particular attention to diversity when choosing its candidates for elections for the lower chamber of parliament, a place where non-white MPs are rare.

Nevertheless, according to an official in his office, Macron discussed the issue with a handful of journalists on Wednesday in an off-the-record conversation, in which he said that the way French people of African descent are treated is something that France needs to address.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen waded into the conversation on Friday by visiting a police station and saying Castaner was not the right man for the job.

“Our law enforcement forces have been abandoned by the political hierarchy,” Le Pen said. “It is evident that [Castaner] is not in the right place.”

Ahead of the first round of the presidential election in 2017, a total of 44 percent of members of the security forces intended to vote for Le Pen, according to an IFOP poll — a far higher number than for any other candidate.

There are also growing calls in France, like the U.K., Belgium and the U.S., to take down statues of figures that were involved in the slave trade.

“We have in front of the National Assembly in France a statue of [Jean-Baptiste] Colbert. Colbert who prepared the Black Code [that codified slavery in France],” said Louis-George Tin, the honorary president of the representative council of black associations in France.

Colbert also played a central role in establishing the French state as a strategic planner who ran the industries and the arts as France asserted itself as a great power.

Macron is opposed to taking down such statues because he doesn’t believe erasing history solves any problems, according to the official in his office.