The EU exists because its nations swore never to repeat the past. European integration is the insurance policy against the oldest temptation of power: that a majority, however large, decides who does not belong. So countries across the continent agreed to share power across borders, and to answer to laws that none of them individually controlled.

The European parliament is where that promise is meant to be kept. Directly elected by nearly 360 million citizens, it co-writes the EU’s laws, elects the president of the European Commission and can dismiss the closest thing Europe has to a government – the commission itself. For decades, a grand coalition of centre-right parties and socialists, later joined by liberals and greens, governed it on that premise. They were committed to closer cooperation, the rule of law and maintaining a firewall against the far right.

In June, in Strasbourg, that promise was broken by the parliament itself.

“Send them back! Send them back!” The chant rose from rightwing MEPs pumping their fists, as the chamber approved the harshest migration law in EU history. The “return regulation”, as this law is called, does exactly what European integration was designed to prevent: it lets a majority decide who does not belong, putting them beyond the law’s reach – and after Ceuta, Europe’s leaders are demanding it should be applied faster. The regulation allows EU countries to deport people to detention centres outside EU territory, placing them further from judicial protection, media scrutiny and public accountability.

Approval of this law was not a rightwing putsch. It was the clearest sign of a quiet shift within an institution that, however overlooked, shapes what kind of union Europeans get to live in.

The political coalition that shaped EU legislation for decades hasn’t formally........

© The Guardian