AMONG the few certainties in this short life are death, taxes, and a wink from the European Union whenever France flouts its fiscal rules. This week France secured its third reprieve in six years, when EU finance ministers granted it two extra years to get its budget deficit below 3% of GDP, the limit enshrined in EU law. Inside the euro zone, serial rule-breakers are supposed ultimately to face the prospect of hefty fines. But despite its plan to run a deficit of 4.1% this year, France’s punishment was altogether milder, amounting to stern words from the European Commission (which monitors the EU’s fiscal rules) and an instruction to tighten the fiscal screws a little more.

The proposal for tolerance sparked a robust discussion among ministers, as the tortured language of their joint statement on France made clear. “The evidence did not lead the Council to conclude that no effective action [to tackle the deficit] had been taken,” it read. Among hardliners were the Irish and Portuguese ministers, both from governments that have imposed fiscal misery on their citizens. It is hard to avoid their conclusion that large countries are absolved from rules that minnows must live by.

Yet renewed agonies over Greece have sometimes found the euro zone in a more schoolmasterly mood. Syriza, which rode an anti-austerity wave to election victory in late January, told voters that it would end the pain. But Greece’s euro-zone partners, upon whom the country still relies for financial support, saw no reason to change the rules. The Greeks’ proposals, such as replacing debt with growth-linked bonds, have been met with silence or worse, and their hardball negotiating strategies with derision. To keep itself afloat, the government has been forced into a series of reversals, and more are likely to follow. (Technical talks between Greece and its creditors on structural reforms began this week.)

Greece has long been a test case for the resilience of Europe’s rules. Germans and others have been hard on the Greeks so as not to encourage misbehaviours elsewhere. Countries like Spain, facing Syriza-like insurgencies, have been forced to take a tough line. For Syriza, this dynamic has been devastating. It took office vowing to restore dignity to the Greek people. But its bull-headed approach pushed the euro zone to tighten the noose. “The prevailing view in Europe is that these guys are crazy,” says a senior official involved in talks with the Greeks, “and that the only thing that will bring them to their senses is a near-death experience.”

The different treatment of Greece and France shows that the question of whether, and how strictly, to apply rules is highly political. That suits the French, but spooks others. Germany agreed to the creation of the euro only on condition that it was bound by a fiscal and monetary regime (and an independent central bank) that would curb the profligate. Small wonder Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, is fretting about flexibility.

Yet France seems to have a government that is at last serious about reform, particularly to the labour market. Fiscal breathing-space, says the government, will help defang opposition to its programme. It has a good case: Europe’s rules too often encourage pro-cyclical fiscal policy and make it hard to take advantage of low interest rates to invest more. Applied too bluntly, they can foster extremists, as both the French and Greeks argue. Even the Germans have some sympathy with this. The trouble is that the game France is playing has 27 other participants. After this week’s meeting, Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, said that if France was getting flexibility, he wanted some too.

There are complexities elsewhere. Take the role of the European Central Bank, which dislikes the French extension: ignore the fiscal rules, it reckons, and the whole project may unravel. On Greece, too, it has been a stickler, denying Syriza’s requests to issue more short-term debt on the ground that this would violate a ban on monetary financing of states. So far, so Teutonic. And yet in some German eyes the ECB’s money-printing and negative interest rates are turning it into a bad bank. Nor is the ECB the apolitical institution it sometimes claims to be. It writes its own rules on matters like liquidity support or debt issuance and interprets them freely, as Greece has been discovering.

The law is sometimes an ass, but we don’t know when

“This European Union cannot only be based on good will,” said Jean Monnet, a founding father, in 1952. “Rules are necessary.” Since Monnet’s time the EU has grown to 28 members, making it ever harder to rely on trust. Such worries inspired the German-led drive to tighten the euro zone’s rules after the crisis threatened to tear the project apart: obliging, for example, members to write balanced-budget provisions into national law. To its neighbours, the EU’s image as a law-bound club makes it an attractive alternative to corrupt national elites; that is what inspired pro-European Ukrainians to take to the streets.

Yet over the years the EU has often bent the rules for a higher cause, such as the single currency (the debt criterion for membership was egregiously fudged for Belgium and Italy) or expansion to the east (Romania and Bulgaria were let in before corruption had been properly tackled). Such transgressions were forgiven as one-offs in the construction of grands projets. But today, with a bewildering array of rules governing basic fiscal operations, infractions are run-of-the-mill. Even Germany sins. In 2003 it breached the 3% deficit limit with impunity. More recently it has ignored the euro-zone’s “macroeconomic imbalances procedure” by running current-account surpluses far above 6% of GDP.

The EU’s image as a political club that put laws above politics may be the most romantic ideal of bureaucracy the world has known. But it does not always survive encounters with reality, as the French example shows. Hypocrisy alone is no mortal sin. But rules without political commitment may breed tension and mistrust. Some situations call for a strict application of rules, others do not. Alas, there is no rule to tell them apart.