Thread by @rdanielkelemen

Quick 🧵 on what @vonderleyen #SOTEU speech might mean for @EU_Commission’s approach to EU’s autocracy/ rule of law crisis: it isn’t good news.

2. Here’s full text. Section “STANDING UP FOR OUR DEMOCRACY” starts 2/3 of the way down. It begins (oddly) with a section on Queen Elizabeth II. Then vdL says “This is the time to invest in the power of democracies” & affirms commitment to EU enlargement ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…

3. She claims “the path towards strong democracies and the path towards our Union are one and the same.” This ignores the fact that the two most rapidly autocratizing countries in world were EU member states & 2 more of top 10 are EU candidates

4. She then proposes “Defence of Democracy package” to fight
“covert foreign influence” saying “We will not allow any autocracy's Trojan horses to attack our democracies from within.” I appreciate her subtle nod to my work on Trojan horses w/ @m_orenstein onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

5. This is a great initiative, but her comments ignore extent to which Russia and China already have a Trojan horse government (Orban’s autocracy in Hungary) serving their interests in @EUCouncil

6. Then comes the key passage re rule of law crisis. Nice tone, but weak on specifics. Doesn’t promise any concrete, immediate action. I take this as a very bad sign

7. I appreciated the tone of her mea culpa “Many of us have taken democracy for granted for too long. Especially those, like me, who have never experienced what it means to live under the fist of an authoritarian regime”, but what she says next worries me…

8. First she says “So let me assure you: we will keep insisting on judicial independence.” But in reality @EU_Commission has NOT been insisting on judicial independence. As @ProfPech explains they’re rewarding its destruction. verfassungsblog.de/covering-up-an…

9. In fact @EU_Commission was just taken to court by four associations of European judges for failing to insist on judicial independence eulawlive.com/op-ed-european…

10. Finally she says, “And we will also protect our budget through the conditionality mechanism.” But will she? @EU_Commission is to announce whether it will propose suspension of 🇪🇺 funds to 🇭🇺 under the regulation next week (and if so how much).

11. I don’t find that one, unelaborated line “And we will also protect our budget through the conditionality mechanism” to be a promising indication that they are planning to take robust action…

12. Legally speaking they should recommend 100% of funds to HU as @KimLaneLaw @JMorijn & I showed in our report for @daniel_freund. Lots of rumors this week about what they’ll propose. We’ll see in a few days danielfreund.eu/legal-opinion-…

13. Overall @vonderleyen’s sentiments on rule of law & democracy in #SOTEU2022 are good, but she still fails to admit there are autocratic governments inside the EU & still focuses too much on creating new tools rather than promising robust use of existing ones. END 🧵.

One other thing: striking that in a speech before @Europarl_EN, @vonderleyen avoids acknowledging that @Europarl_EN is about to declare that an EU member government (Hungary) is no longer a democracy europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda…