Commission overplayed Roma hand

Reding’s Roma rhetoric could widen the gap between the Commission and the member states.

Barely a week after Viviane Reding launched her attack on France’s treatment of Roma, the European Commission is on the defensive, struggling to hold its ground. A partial retreat by Reding, the European commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, and by Commission President José Manuel Barroso – they regretted her references to the Second World War – was not enough to avert a bruising encounter at Thursday’s European Council.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy was predictably combative. He found allies among his fellow national leaders – notably Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister – who believe that the Commission should not harangue a member state before the court of public opinion. Barroso came off second best. He was always going to struggle to turn the discussion to treatment of Roma by national governments (rather than treatment of member states by the Commission) when the Commission had not completed its investigations (and it still has not done so).

As Barroso, an ex-prime minister, knows very well, the club of national government leaders is unlikely to encourage attacks by European commissioners on one of their own. Their instinct is to band together against the common enemy – in this case, the Commission. Granted, countries such as Romania and Bulgaria have a very different take on the Roma issue from France, but Reding’s rhetoric did not make it easy for the neutrals or near-neutrals to side with Barroso.

None of this is to say that Sarkozy and his sidekicks, Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister, Eric Besson, the immigration minister, and Pierre Lellouche, the European affairs minister, are in the clear. They have yet to address the substance of the accusations. But they have at least succeeded in venting sufficient clouds of self-righteous indignation to obscure the issue. That they were able to do so is in no small part down to Reding’s insatiable appetite for the television lights and her fondness for the soundbite.

She and her team were understandably excited by the leak of instructions from France’s interior ministry to police chiefs. On the face of it, the instructions explicitly targeted Roma. But Reding has learnt the hard way that ‘on the face of it’ is not sufficient to support an all-out attack on a member state. The Commission is the guardian of the treaties. But the treaties require that the Commission challenge member states by a ponderous process that might result (in a year or two) in a case coming to court. The treaties do not give the Commission the right to rush to judgment, even where there is an apparently glaring case of breach of EU law.

In retrospect, Reding will realise that a less hasty, more measured response to the interior ministry instructions would have been more effective. The error is all the greater if, as still seems likely, the Commission investigation concludes that France was indeed in breach of EU rules and has been discriminating against the Roma. Reding has, temporarily at least, given the French government an opportunity to present itself as victim rather than oppressor.

Not all is lost. Reding did at least raise the Roma issue to the level of a real political crisis in the EU. In turn, that has obliged Herman Van Rompuy to put the treatment of the Roma onto the agenda of the October meeting of the European Council. The plight of the Roma is a genuine problem for the EU – many thousands live in poverty, deprived of education and not integrated into their hostile ‘host’ societies. They are a challenge to the EU’s much-vaunted European social model. The problem can no longer be ignored.

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Less optimistically, there is another possible outcome from Reding’s Roma rhetoric. The gap between the Commission and the member states may widen. National governments, distrusting Barroso and his team, will resort to bilateral deals that leave the Commission out of the picture. Intergovernmentalism was already on the rise: the Commission has done itself no favours.