Literally yesterday prime minister went on record to say they will outright ignore the ruling of the highest EU court on an ecological / energy case (lignite mining close to the Czech border.
As a result, the EU tries to sanction Poland, but Hungary won't agree and so the sanction fails. Try to sanction Hungary? Poland is out, sanction fails. I have to admit that it's clever on Poland and Hungary's part, as it lets them selectively ignore some of the EU's more (from their perspective) overbearing rulings.
Unless you want the EU to be a super state that can bully it‘s members with a mere 51% of the vote? The EU would fall apart then.
It’s not even like the EU has big expectations of Poland. The sticking point now is an independent judiciary and free press. Seriously, it’s embarrassing that Poland has to be strong armed into these!
In any case, Poland freely signed up to these commitments, it’s just bad form to eke out of them like this. Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland.
Who voted them in? If you say that the people voted them in, it's painful, but it is the politics of the region. One of the terrifying parts of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for their leaders, including leaders who will actively undermine their own democracy, and they can be content with that because that's what they wanted. In which case, democracy has done what the people wanted, by ruining democracy.
It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy. Similarly, the ability of a democratic people to vote to end democracy is democracy working even though it is also an awful necessary loophole.
And if you say that we must take effort to prevent a democratic people, legally speaking, from democratically voting to end democracy, you are now technically anti-democratic. That's a weird place to be.
Democracy depends on a strong free press and independent courts. A strong free press is not just one part of a country’s businesses, it is quite literally the fourth pillar of democracy.
Juries are not a thing in most countries that are generally considered democracies, so jury nullification can't be all that neccesary.
Also, if the political tensions in our nation continue to increase and don't stop, I would not be surprised in a decade from now if we start talking about replacing the Federal Government with a more EU-like arrangement.
Unlike the USA—which has a really strong executive branch—there is hardly any executive branch in the EU. Instead the executive powers are held almost entirely by the member states. The EU does have a legislative branch (just like the USA) with around 650,000 people per representative. USA has around 750,000 but that number is further devalued by the USA senate (3,500,000 people per representative) which can hold a lot of power over the congress. I’m not aware that the EU has any equivalent.
The scope of the two systems is also vastly different. The USA federal government represents the foreign policy of each of the state, funds a military which answers to the government, finances much of the infrastructure within the USA, etc. In the EU foreign policy is largely held by the member states, there is no EU military, and funding for infrastructure projects is more likely to come mostly from the member state it self, then from the EU. The USA collects federal taxes, while the EU gets their funding from the member states.
Both have a federated court system. The USA have federal criminal courts which I’m not sure that the EU has, or at least not in the same way the USA does.
To summarize: The US federal government and the EU have in common that they both have a democratically elected legislator (both with relatively low representation) and they both have a federal court system. But this is where the similarities end.
> The Articles of Confederation created a loose union of states. The confederation's central government consisted of a unicameral Congress with legislative and executive function, and was composed of delegates from each state in the union. Congress received only those powers which the states had previously recognized as belonging to king and parliament.[15] Each state had one vote in Congress, regardless of its size or population, and any act of Congress required the votes of nine of the 13 states to pass;[16] any decision to amend the Articles required the unanimous consent of the states. Each state's legislature appointed multiple members to its delegation, allowing delegates to return to their homes without leaving their state unrepresented.[17] Under the Articles, states were forbidden from negotiating with other nations or maintaining a military without Congress's consent, but almost all other powers were reserved for the states.[18] Congress lacked the power to raise revenue, and was incapable of enforcing its own legislation and instructions. As such, Congress was heavily reliant on the compliance and support of the states.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_Period#National_...
Of course, the EU functions better since it has its funding sorted out, whereas the executive under the Confederation more or less begged for money every year and did not usually get its requested allocation.
But they don't want that hassle, and they want to keep the EU benefits, so this mutual veto of sanctions is definitely a loophole to keep as many benefits without meeting the requirements.
The EU is not the UN, while the UN's goal is to have every country in membership, and so it doesn't expel dictatorships just for being dictatorships, the EU is pretty explicit about democracy and human rights being requirements, which is why e.g. Turkey has not been allowed in so long.
Had Orban had the level of control when Hungary joined that he has now, Hungary would not have been allowed in. PiS is probably not yet at that level, but it's clear they would like to be.
The constructive equilibria in political systems appear to be unstable, and need active work to keep them there. The EU is in fact born out of that very realisation - its earliest seeds are in binding France and Germany in an economic union so they stop going to war with each other!
What's even the point of issuing rulings that can be ignored by the collusion of two out of 27 members?
No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.
Once you start looking for tenuous connections, every human activity can be subsumed under trade. It's a wildcard.
On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
The fact that one state can reject anything, is going to be the end of the EU if they don't fix it.
The system supports autocratic state capture in Poland and Hungary through massive EU subsidies - my tax money. No, it's not working.
In reality, what Germany and France buy with that „bribe“ is being able to freely export their goods (cars and retail items via international supermarket chains in particular) to Eastern European markets, while making sure the profits go back to the motherland (and are taxed there by the German/French government, leaving nothing in Eastern Europe).
You get your tax monies more than back.
Poor excuse, but I'll make it for the record's sake.
The current EU plan is to hope that Hungary or Poland's governments get replaced with one that won't support the other, and then consider doing the sanctions.
The other EU plan is to pursue other punishments that don't require a full sanction and basically cause as much hurt as possible even if they can't do the ideal remedy.
“Screw you and your rules. Also, help!”
It wasn't only Germany, though; also France stopped shipments of masks to Sweden. And there were other cases in the big key member states.
https://www.svd.se/frankrike-beslagtar-masker-fran-svenskt-f...
Normally such freight would go via hubs in Germany, for instance; to avoid Germany confiscating masks, my country (Finland) hired planes to import masks directly from China, without using the hubs in Germany.
That’s how he explained the popularity of Silvio Berlusconi too - “of course the guy is a cheat and a fraud, but he is cheating for us now”.
I’m unsure if these views were in any way representative but I found them interesting.