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“In theory, fines could be up to 10% of each bank’s annual global turnover,” said Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow in competition policy at the Centre for European Reform. “Since the collusion only relates to a small part of their businesses, the fines are likely to be considerably smaller.”

Whether the EU will manage to meet its ambitious climate goals will now depend on member states’ willingness to deliver on the plans and to abstain from watering down any legislation that does not sit well with their voters, says Elisabetta Cornago of the Centre for European Reform in Brussels. 

Europe is “less on top of Greece for doing pushbacks and all the sort of things,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, who heads the Brussels office for the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.The latitude given Greece, she said, was in part recognition that the country had lived through a decade of brutal austerity.

“Immigration pretty much automatically adds to GDP because there are more people in the country working and consuming,” said John Springford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “We have some good evidence that immigration actually helps to grease the wheels of the labor market a bit, and allows people to hand off lower-productivity tasks to other workers and concentrate on things which they were most productive at.”

“I don’t think many European governments are very concerned, presumably because these crises come round quite often but never end in disaster,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform in London. “Cutting short the trip is a bad signal, but there is such good will to Biden in most capitals that they are prepared to cut him some slack.”