Hungary’s lessons, applied in Poland… is it late for the EU’s championing of the Rule of Law?
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Michael Meyer-Resende writes on the The Guardian that perhaps one day the spring of 2019 will be remembered as the moment when the European Union halted the destruction of democratic institutions in its member states. Just look at how governments in Poland, Hungary and Romania have backtracked on anti-democratic measures they were seeking to introduce.
And this week, in a landmark ruling, the European court of justice declared that the enforced early retirement of Poland’s supreme court judges would be unlawful. Could this be a tipping point? What’s clear is that law, money and politics have aligned in ways that now make it more difficult for the Viktor Orbán playbook to be repeated across Europe.
The significance of the 24 June ruling by the European court on Poland stems from the fact that for the first time, an EU institution has stopped an attempted takeover of a national court in its tracks.
Retiring judges early aims to make way for government-appointed judges and amounts to a systemic assault on the independence of the judiciary. The recent ruling shows that EU law has teeth. And these will become sharper when financial aspects are added.
The European commission has proposed cuts to EU funding to countries that do not uphold the rule of law. Both the Hungarian and Polish governments have been huge beneficiaries of EU funds. Hungary in particular is notorious for high-level corruption cases – to which its institutions have turned a blind eye. Now, Orbán has reasons to worry that his “business” model of channelling public opinion against “Brussels” – all the while taking EU money to prop up his power base – will cease to work.
