The time has come to ask whether membership in the European Union is still a quality assurance seal for democracy and the rule of law among member states. The bloc has clearly failed to enforce its stated values on its periphery. Any additional expansion can only dilute them further.
On Monday, Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kusnirova were found murdered — shot with a single bullet each — in the town where they lived near Bratislava. Kuciak had investigated alleged tax fraud by a real estate magnate with links to the country's interior minister as well as a possible connection between Italian mafia and an adviser to Prime Minister Robert Fico. He had been threatened, but police did nothing about it.
Kuciak was the second investigative journalist to be murdered in the EU in less than six months. Last year, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's nemesis, was blown up with a car bomb. It's still not known who ordered the contract killing.