The meeting of the European Council held last week was deservedly described as a "doomsday summit". It took place in the shadow not only of the terrifying winter wave of covid-19 and the increasingly certain chaotic no-deal Brexit, but also under the pressure of threats by the governments of Hungary and Poland to veto the European Union budget for the period 2021-27. and block a proposed pandemic recovery fund, which would put hundreds of millions of people at risk.
Hungary and Poland are trying to block the implementation of a new "rule of law" mechanism that will prevent European Union money from being used for corrupt practices - a practice for which Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's kleptocratic regime is well known. As the EU's longest-serving head of state, German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to find a way out by calling on "all sides" to prepare "for some kind of compromise".
But why would the European Union accept compromises in the domain of the rule of law (one of the fundamental values included in the Lisbon Treaty) and why would the taxpayers in the European Union agree to enrich authoritarian politicians and their friends with their hard-earned money? Instead of leaving it to her to negotiate a compromise, Europeans should remind Merkel that this is her last chance to show that she really cares about democracy and the rule of law.
After all, her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its close Christian Social Union of Bavaria enabled Orbán to build his autocracy. Ursula von der Leyen, whom A. Merkel brought to the position of president of the European Commission, failed to protect the independence of the Polish judiciary from the chauvinist, populist and increasingly less cooperative government led by the Law and Justice Party.
For a long time, the simmering crisis of the "rule of law" in Europe seemed to be a rather abstract and not so urgent problem compared to some of the other challenges that Merkel has faced in her long career, from the euro crisis, to the refugee crisis of 2015, to the current pandemic. , even though it is a crisis that most directly threatens the very moral core of the European Union, including the performance of many daily tasks.
Although it is often caricatured as a distant and uninterested superstate, the European Union actually cooperates very closely with the member states on the implementation of EU policies. More importantly, the EU functions primarily as a legal community in which national courts perform the functions of European courts. Such an arrangement cannot survive without mutual trust, as it depends on the willingness of national courts to recognize decisions made before the courts of other member states. If the judiciary falls under the control of an authoritarian regime that openly deals with politically unsuitable judges (as is the case in Poland), we cannot expect courts in other countries to respect arbitrarily made court decisions.
The European Commission is the "guardian of fundamental agreements" in which fundamental European values are incorporated. But attempts to enforce respect for those values in cases of their violation by some member states usually come too late and offer too little. After years of inexcusable behavior by Poland and Hungary, the Commission still naively calls for "dialogue" and allows autocratic pretenders to consolidate power by co-opting the judiciary and creating their own facts on the ground.
Due to the unwillingness of the Commission to do its job, member states are forced to take matters into their own hands. That is why the European arrest warrant is losing its importance, as more and more countries refuse to extradite to Poland, a country where there are no longer guarantees for a fair trial. This month, the Dutch parliament called on the Dutch government to sue Poland for violating the rule of law, potentially opening a bilateral dispute that could have been avoided if the Commission had done its part.
Meanwhile, in a recent interview, Orban accused Germany of "intellectual indifference," claiming that it is incapable of seeing the larger historical picture and is insensitive to the historical experiences of smaller member states. Orbán turned everything upside down: if Germany showed indifference in anything, it was the need to protect democracy and the rule of law in Orbán's Hungary.
Germany's neglect of key European values could be explained by Orbán's faithful service to the German auto industry, which produced the system already described as "Audicracy". Make no mistake, some CDU members have long spoken of "red lines" that Orbán should not cross and have occasionally called for his Fidesz party to be excluded from the supranational European People's Party, a grouping of conservative parties in the European Parliament.
But Orbán has not yet been forced to pay a serious political or financial price for his behavior. Because of such a conciliatory policy, some commentators emphasize, he now treats his European "partners" as brutally as his own country and accuses them of turning the European Union into a new Soviet Union.
Angela Merkel has been deservedly praised for opposing outgoing President Donald Trump and his attacks on common liberal-democratic values and international institutions, as well as for the determination she has shown in managing the pandemic crisis. She held her own bravely when she agreed to redistribute the debt within the new recovery fund, which should ensure a stronger financial foothold for the European Union.
But when he steps down next year, he will not leave behind a coherent framework that will protect the eurozone and contribute to the realization of Europe's aspirations to become a global "normative force" in promoting democracy and the rule of law. Its commitment to these values will ring hollow if it continues to tolerate member states that no longer meet democratic criteria. Her political legacy would look very different if she stood up to Europe's self-proclaimed illiberals. By refusing to do so, it shows that fundamental European values are negotiable and that the European Union is vulnerable to blackmail.
A statement on the proposed mechanism of the rule of law in the Council of Europe at the initiative of Germany would probably end in its adoption, because Hungary and Poland cannot block a decision for the adoption of which a qualified majority is sufficient. It is also unlikely that Orbán and the Polish government would continue to insist on blocking 1,8 trillion euros of badly needed funds after that.
Whatever happens, European taxpayers will remember that these are the governments that were prepared to endanger the citizens of the entire European Union just to prevent control over the spending of distributed funds. Orbán claims that accepting the mechanism of the rule of law would be political suicide for him. Maybe that's true. But that is not the problem of the European Union.
The author is an associate at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Studies
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: Đ. Tomić)
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