Final Word from Thursday, May 19, 2016

Bohuslav Sobotka counts on people not paying much heed to his foreign-policy comments, because he knows that only this allows him to get away with changing them according to the current situation. As long as he is PM, though, we must take the comments seriously. So we must notice that he has been adamantly refusing to join Slovakia in suing the EU over the distribution of refugees. We must notice that, according to Interior Min. Milan Chovanec, the cabinet is probably now prepared to file a complaint against the EU if the CR is overruled on the quota issue. We must also notice that Sobotka initially had only praise for Angela Merkel when she announced her secret refugee and visa-waiver deal with Turkey and that he criticized his own MPs for supporting a resolution against the visa waiver. We must notice that he is now quietly adopting much the same language on this as the MPs he criticized. Finally, we must notice that it took a few months and an informal censure from Parliament but that Sobotka is now where Miloš Zeman was on these two issues all along. [Czech Republic president prime minister European Union]