The European Union still prides itself on being a progressive entity capable of projecting eastwards into once inhospitable terrain values and institutions essential for good governance and economic success. But two reports being released this week on Romania and Bulgaria, members since 2007, show how hollow such rhetoric is becoming. Corruption remains entrenched and efforts to counter it are blocked at high level. Bulgaria will suffer some penalties but Romania, now the seventh largest EU state, will emerge largely unscathed.

Except for brief interludes of reform, political power has been wielded in the two decades since communism ended by a narrow set of parties and economic interest groups. They comprise a trans-party oligarchy, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with one another and are determined not to be accountable before the law or to be impeded by constraints from Brussels.