Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Europe's Cherry-Pickers Run Into Trouble

The European Union may not longer be so tolerant of blatant rule-breaking from the east.

June 14, 2017 at 10:53 AM 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.”

A deal is a deal.
Photographer: ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty Images

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In any union of entities with diverging interests, cherry-picking -- or, to use a beautiful German word, Rosinenpickerei -- is an issue. The European Union is no exception, and right now, the bloc's post-Communist members stand accused of cherry-picking from EU rules. It may cost them.

On Tuesday, the European Commission voted to start infringement proceedings against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic for not taking in refugees as the EU agreed in 2015. That is, in part, just a pretext: European countries without a Communist past suspect these nations of reneging on European liberal, democratic values, but the refugee issue provides a more convenient avenue of attack than trying to censure them for infringements on the rule of law.