Eurobloat #0138 • October 2021
October was the month a Polish court dared to say its own constitution came first, and the Union responded with a daily fine, a thunderous Parliament resolution and a lecture from the Commission about who is really in charge. Meanwhile the chargers were standardised, the energy bills were not, and the border guards in Warsaw were doing the job Brussels would rather pretend nobody needed.
Folly of the Month: One million euros a day, payable to Brussels
On 27 October the Court of Justice ordered Poland to pay the Commission one million euros for every day it failed to suspend the disciplinary chamber of its Supreme Court, the largest such penalty ever levied on a member state. The mechanism is worth admiring for its honesty: a national government is now metered like a parking offender, the clock running on the meter held by the very institution that brought the case. Whatever one thinks of Warsaw's judges, the spectacle of an EU court invoicing a capital city by the day for non-obedience tells you exactly where the Union believes sovereignty now lives. The money, naturally, flows towards Brussels.
1. A national constitution dares to come first
On 7 October Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled in case K 3/21 that parts of the EU treaties were incompatible with the Polish constitution, the radical proposition that a country's founding document outranks rulings handed down in Luxembourg. Brussels treated this as heresy rather than as the ordinary view held by most nations on earth.
2. The Parliament deplores, at length
In its October plenary the European Parliament solemnly deplored the Polish ruling as an attack on the community of values and a threat to the primacy of EU law, that cornerstone principle written down in no treaty article but enforced as gospel. The chamber that cannot audit its own institutions found time to grade a member state's supreme court.
3. The surveillance machine asks to be switched off
On 6 October the Parliament voted to call for a ban on facial recognition and biometric mass surveillance by police in public spaces, predictive policing and scraped face databases. A fine sentiment, though one might ask who spent years building the legal scaffolding for an AI-policing single market in the first place, and why a non-binding resolution is the strongest brake available.
4. A toolbox for a fire Brussels helped light
On 13 October the Commission unveiled an energy-price toolbox, which on inspection mostly consisted of permitting member states to do the obvious things they were already doing: cutting taxes and supporting poorer households. The grand European response to soaring gas bills was to harmonise the paperwork around national measures and promise to examine, in due course, the electricity market it had spent years redesigning.
→ ireland.representation.ec.europa.eu
5. The Commission accused of exceeding its powers, by a prime minister
On 6 October the Slovenian prime minister, holding the rotating presidency, told Euronews that the Commission was close to breaking the rule of law itself by entering the political battles of member states rather than acting as an honest broker. When the country chairing your meetings says you have overreached, it is not obvious the lesson lands.
6. The standardised charger
By October the Commission's plan to mandate a single USB-C port across phones, tablets, cameras, headphones and the rest was the Parliament's celebrated achievement of the month, a triumph of harmonisation over the catastrophe of consumers owning more than one cable. Twenty-seven member states, one Commission and a directorate-general, all bent to the urgent question of which hole the wire goes in.
7. The border the Union would rather not guard
Through October the manufactured migrant crisis on the Belarus frontier peaked, with Lukashenko funnelling thousands towards Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, and Polish lawmakers voting to build a wall to hold the line. Warsaw deployed soldiers and concrete; Brussels deployed concern, having spent two decades insisting that strong external borders were somehow not the point.
8. The blacklist that is a blunt instrument
On 21 October the Parliament adopted a resolution on the Pandora Papers conceding that its own tax-haven blacklist was a blunt instrument that somehow misses the worst offenders, the British Virgin Islands accounting for two thirds of the leaked shell companies while sitting comfortably off the list. The solution proposed, inevitably, was more EU rules to fix the EU rules.
9. The Parliament refuses to sign off the Council's accounts
In its October plenary the Parliament again refused to grant budget discharge for the 2019 accounts of the European Council and the Council of the EU, a polite institutional way of saying the books were not satisfactory. The disagreement is now an annual ritual, the gravy train rolling on while two institutions cannot agree who gets to check the receipts.
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