AMONG the many delights of Christmas Eve (Wigilia) in Poland is the custom of setting an empty place for an unexpected friend, relative or stranger who happens to drop in. The tradition is grounded, depending on whom you ask, in Biblical practice, remembrance of deported compatriots in war or pagan ancestor-worship. It emerged centuries ago, but survives at many carp-laden Wigilia tables across the world.

Inside the European Union, though, Poland’s populist-nationalist government is coming close to empty-chairing itself. Driven by the views of its leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has spent two years sucking the independence from public institutions in a bid to reverse perceived wrongs of the post-1989 settlement. The European Commission, which as the guardian of EU treaties monitors such things, has spent the same period impotently wringing its hands. Having already defanged the constitutional tribunal, the Polish parliament passed laws in July that would, among other things, have obliged many Supreme Court judges to resign. (The government claims the court is riddled with communist holdovers.)

The commission was set to invoke Article 7, an as-yet unused provision of the EU treaty that requires national governments to consider whether one of their number is threatening the rule of law. It stayed its hand when Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, unexpectedly vetoed the laws. Some hoped he might emerge as a roadblock to Mr Kaczynski’s permanent revolution. But his act was better understood as a complex piece of manoeuvring inside PiS. Both chambers of the Polish parliament have now passed versions of the earlier laws with only cosmetic revisions, and Mr Duda has signalled that he will soon sign them. The Venice Commission, an arm of the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental club that protects human rights, says PiS’s reforms bear a “striking resemblance” to instruments of the Soviet Union.

Its patience exhausted, the commission is once more on the verge of triggering Article 7. Its vice-president, Frans Timmermans, could announce a decision as soon as December 20th—quite the Christmas present. This would hand responsibility to the EU’s national governments. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron back the commission’s stance. Even the Czechs, allies of the Poles inside the central European Visegrad group, are said to be ready to back Article 7.

Dealing with members that undermine the rule of law is perhaps the gnarliest of the EU’s army of problems. From Italy to Hungary to Romania, governments have long thumbed their nose at principles, including respect for the rule of law, to which their membership of the club supposedly commits them. Officials in Brussels face an impossible dilemma. Ignore transgressions, and you advertise your weakness while encouraging other miscreants. Deliver homilies on the rule of law to elected governments, and you become an easy target for their barbs. Many Polish voters, fed a propaganda diet in public media that PiS has weaponised, do not mind their government’s squabbles with the EU. Along with the nationalist Fidesz, which governs Hungary, PiS is among the most popular ruling parties in Europe.

Pulling the trigger this week, or soon afterwards, would hardly change that. The first stage of Article 7, which needs the backing of 22 out of 27 governments, would merely give Poland another rap over the knuckles. Stripping Poland of its voting rights, which would need unanimous support from the other members, would almost certainly be blocked by Hungary’s Viktor Orban (and other governments that prize EU unity, like Germany’s, would take a lot of convincing). The danger, as Jan-Werner Müller, a professor at Princeton, has written, is that “the EU comes across as imperialist in aspiration and impotent in practice.” Wojciech Przybylski, editor of Visegrad Insight, a Warsaw-based journal, notes that Article 7 also places Poland’s opposition in a bind: back the government, or side with foreign interests against it?

Aware of the limits of their tools, politicians outside Poland have pinned their hopes on other things: Polish civil society, a run on sovereign bonds triggered by PiS’s profligacy, the political opposition and, most recently, Mr Kaczynski’s appointment of Mateusz Morawiecki, the brainy, English-speaking finance minister, as prime minister. (Mr Kaczynski himself quietly rules the country without a government role.) None has materialised. Poland’s booming economy keeps the deficit down (for now); the opposition is divided and demoralised; and the protest movement is visibly exhausted. As for the urbane Mr Morawiecki, last week he decorously compared his government’s judicial purges to the experience of post-Vichy France, before leaving his first summit of EU leaders in Brussels early to catch a flight back to Warsaw.

Money talks

If Brussels has painted itself into a corner, can Europe’s governments do any better? Germany, distracted by drawn-out coalition talks, is out of ideas. Perhaps Mr Macron will have more luck. He has been trying to patch things up with Poland after a summer war of words, and last week Mr Morawiecki invited him to attend Poland’s centennial independence celebrations next November. Some wonder if a revival of the French-German-Polish “Weimar triangle”, once a fruitful forum for political and military discussions, could bring Poland in from the cold.

Alas, the EU budget, for which negotiations begin next year, is the more likely arena to settle the dispute, and Poland, a major beneficiary of EU subsidies, is in for a rough ride. Some rich governments are already vowing to use the talks to punish countries like Poland that refuse to take in refugees. Backsliding on rule-of-law commitments will strengthen their case. It will be an unedifying and unwelcome spectacle, but if Poland remains determined to lose friends and alienate people, in Europe and beyond, the rest of the EU will not feel bound to help it.