“It’s not enough to give doctors and nurses a pat on the back and call them ‘heroes,’” Matteo Salvini told Italy’s leading politics talk show on April 9. “A pay raise would have been more concrete.”

Two days earlier, the Italian Senate had rebuffed his proposal of a tax cut for medical staff. The blame, the right-wing Lega leader insisted, lay with an “old bureaucratic vision concentrated on pre-virus schemas” — a problem also weighing down laid-off Italians, whose financial help was slow in coming because “the trade unions say no.” Salvini clicked his fingers: “What Italians want is speed.” A swipe with the back of his hand. “In these exceptional times, we need to wipe out the bureaucracy.”

Across the Alps, in France, where the far right is likewise the main opposition party, Marine Le Pen similarly insists that the political center hasn’t understood how times have changed. Her Rassemblement National condemned Emmanuel Macron’s government for its wishy-washy response to the coronavirus — accusing it of “sticking its finger in the wind” to decide what to do, when what was instead needed was the “revival of the strategic state.” Widespread reports of medical staff lacking resources, the state’s failure to roll out mass testing, and the absence of reassurances for small businesses all fed Le Pen’s message.