The EU Is Entering a Constitutional Crisis
By undermining Europe’s top court, Germany’s constitutional judges may have opened Pandora’s Box.
Europe sees red.
Photographer: Sebastian Gollnow/DPA/AFP via Getty Images
You might have been under the impression that the European Union has quite enough problems to manage. For one thing, there’s a pandemic going on, causing a recession and a debt crisis that might blow up the currency union. For another, two member states, Poland and Hungary, are going rogue, undermining democracy and the rule of law and increasingly seeking conflict with Brussels. I’m not the only one who’s been wondering whether the EU has a future at all.
And now some red-robed judges in Karlsruhe, a city that most people have to google-map, have inadvertently made all these problems much more intractable by questioning the European Central Bank’s power to buy bonds for quantitative easing. One effect of the shock verdict by Germany’s constitutional court last week is to hugely complicate the Bank’s efforts to keep the euro area’s economy alive. But the more fundamental consequence is to throw the EU’s entire legal framework into chaos. Yes, the EU now has a full-bore constitutional crisis.