[The Critic] Whose Rule of Law?

The European Union refuses to call out democratic backsliding when orchestrated by the left

For all its sense of itself as the world’s adult in the room, prodding hotheaded populists into statesmanly maturity, the European Union (EU) too often lapses into embarrassing spasms of millennial infantilism. As the bloc’s Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders pockets nearly €300,000 annually from the European taxpayer for a single task: policing member-state violations of rule of law, enshrined as the Union’s ethical cornerstone in article two of its 1992 founding treaty and beefed up with punitive clauses in 2007. Yet at a once-in-a-lifetime plenary last Wednesday scrutinizing authoritarian backsliding in one member the Union counts among its youngest yet most robust democracies (Spain), Reynders had bigger fish to fry. Suddenly cast into the world-historical limelight, the Belgian jurist simply couldn’t get off his phone.

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