This is the year of a nail-biting election in France, and Angela Merkel’s sternest test yet in Germany after the migration crisis and terror attack in Berlin. But the country whose fortunes will play a major role in determining how far the European Union, for all its frictions and shortcomings, remains a credible community of values, is Poland. There Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the Law and Justice party and de facto ruler, has spent 2016 eroding constitutional checks and balances on the judiciary, public appointments, army, press and broadcasting in a purge of liberals and the post-communist left. [...]
What might change matters? There is one bold route around the problem, namely to persuade member states to trigger article 7.1 – which would allow sanctions to be deployed against both Poland and Hungary if they continue to disregard basic rights. That would neatly end the “fellow traveller” veto, by putting both of the EU’s rogue states in special measures. Failing to observe that warning could lead to the suspension of voting rights.
The threat carries some hefty risks. It plays to the view propagated by Law and Justice that the EU is meddling – and the experience of testing popular opinion against Eurocrats has not had a happy 2016. In addition, Germany, which would need to support a stronger line, will not be keen in election year to pick a fight with a querulous neighbour. But Warsaw’s position is more fragile than its rhetoric. It remains exposed to the whims of the even more vigorous autocracy to its east, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Too great a tilt to stroppy isolationism, at a point when Washington’s policies towards Moscow are opaque and unreliable, and Poland risks becoming the friendless giant of eastern central Europe.
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