Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

A Multispeed Europe Will Be Hard to Pull Off

But it still may be the least bad option for a group of nations that disagree.

March 10, 2017 at 5:05 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Which way is Europe going?
Photographer: Dirk Zabinsky/Getty Images/EyeEm

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The European Council, which includes leaders of EU member states, normally issues a consensus document at the end of each meeting. On Thursday, it failed to do so because one member -- Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo -- refused to approve it. The spat tells us something about the rocky future of a multispeed Europe.

Szydlo's snub had nothing to do with the document's content. Poland's nationalist government tried to defeat the re-election of former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as European Council president, but its protests were ignored. Tusk was first chosen in 2014 in recognition of Poland's, and Eastern Europe's, growing role in the bloc. But there's bad blood between Tusk and the current Polish government's chief ideologist and informal leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Poland fought to get him removed. Szydlo, in a huff, refused to back the anodyne communique and was conspicuously late for Friday's session.