EU is much less wonderful than it thinks

Ursula von der Leyen did the right thing last week after she’d tried everything else. The European Commission president finally apologised for the failings of the continent-wide vaccine procurement scheme.
It followed an unseemly few weeks of battle over the vaccine, during which Von der Leyen scapegoated
the Anglo-Swedish pharma company AstraZeneca Plc for supply holdups and threatened to close the
Irish land border to imports of vaccines from the European Union. Even Brussels, which is loath to admit fault, finally conceded that its vaccine rollout has been unsatisfactory.
It’s an admission that reveals deeper problems in institutional Europe. Bluntly, the EU isn’t as effective as it likes to think it is in many policy areas where it took over responsibility from member states.
It has also lost two opportunities to lord it over others in recent months. One is Brexit, which — while still disruptive — ended in a trade deal rather than the unregulated chaos threatened by its most vociferous opponents.
Another is Donald Trump, that willful exemplar of bad faith and anti-liberal politics, who’s fallen from power.
The net effect is that the EU can no longer shine on the global stage by virtue of contrast with wicked Trump and blundering Boris Johnson. Brussels is meant to work well on many fronts, but it doesn’t and electorates are taking notice.
The world’s largest economic bloc is proving erratic as a champion of democracy, too. It has vast reserves
of soft power, but rarely deploys them.
Under its largely German leadership, it has difficulty combining commercial realpolitik with its stated
aim of advocating for pluralism and encouraging democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
The immunisation debacle had a sorry aftermath. On a visit to Moscow earlier this week, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was all smiles as he praised Russia’s Covid vaccine, Sputnik V. It may have
been necessitated by the EU’s possible future shortages but the timing was awful. Alexei Navalny, the dissident leader who survived a military-grade poisoning, was being dragged out of prison to face more trumped-up charges.

—Bloomberg