How come that the most important countries in European Union have the largest number of pending infringements?

Question

According to this source, the number of infringements of the "pivot countries" (France and Germany) are significantly larger than those of the newcomers such as Romania and Bulgaria.

• DE = 55 (entered EU in 1958)
• FR = 49 (entered EU in 1958)

as opposed to

• RO = 23 (entered EU in 2007)
• BG = 17 (entered EU in 2007)

The same seem to be true for related KPIs such as duration of infringement proceedings and time taken to comply.

This is counter-intuitive, as newcomers are expected to adapt much harder to the "ground-rules" than the old countries (who actually started the Union).

Question: How come that the most important countries in European Union have the largest number of pending infringements?

Note: The Commission may start ‘infringement proceedings’ if it considers that e.g. a Member State has not transposed an EU directive correctly or on time, or is applying single market rules incorrectly. Infringement proceedings only start when the Commission sends a ‘letter of formal notice’ to the Member State in question.

[EDIT] More details for non-European users (as requested in comment)

As indicated in the provided source, an infringement is a procedure started by European Commission against a country that does not apply a directive (partially or not at all):

The Commission may start ‘infringement proceedings’ if it considers that e.g. a Member State has not transposed an EU directive correctly or on time, or is applying single market rules incorrectly. Infringement proceedings only start when the Commission sends a ‘letter of formal notice’ to the Member State in question.

Several examples of such procedures can be found here. An actual example is illustrated below:

26/11/2014, MEMO/14/2130, Taxation: Commission asks ROMANIA to stop the discriminatory tax treatment of non- resident individuals receiving income from Romania Case No 2009/2134

16/10/2014, MEMO/14/589, Taxation: Commission asks ROMANIA to stop the discriminatory tax treatment of foreign legal entities Case No 2009/4343 Proceedings closed on 19/11/2015 (Romania changed its legislation)

"Why you expect newcomers to have bigger problems?" (from comment)

According to this reference, Romania si Bulgaria were admitted easier than some expected. For both countries it still applies what we call MVC for justice (quite big problem in Romania, a very big problem in Bulgaria).

Intuitively, newcomers should have more problems due to communist background: many people simply do not understand the separation of powers, the free market and other concepts related to liberal democracy. Also corruption is still endemic (they even tried to facilitate corruption by changing the law).

Answer 1

It seems to me that part of the answer is already contained in the question itself. If infringement proceedings last longer for some member states, they will have more of them open at any given time, everything else being equal. As to why that might be, I cannot offer any hard stats on this but one reason could be that some member states are more willing or better able to fight each case all the way to the EU Court of Justice.

The UK is for example notorious for this, just as a (semi-)random example, it took over two years of procedure to get it to exempt third-country nationals with a residence card as family member of an EU citizen from the requirement to hold a visa, something that is stated very clearly in the relevant directive (this was not an infringement case but a prejudicial question). Once a decision is handed down, the UK bureaucracy is able to implement it competently and professionally but until then it will fight the Commission tooth and nail.

By contrast, I have heard of cases pertaining to some newer member states where the state in question would not even send a representative or written arguments to the court (here again I think it was about prejudicial questions, not infringement proceedings but it shows how specific countries approach EU litigation in general). They simply have much more limited resources to deal with all this. Some countries also take a less contentious approach, I am told that Denmark will most of the time accept the Commission's interpretation as soon as it gets a letter of formal notice and seldom drags the proceedings in court. That would also make for a quicker resolution and smaller number of open cases. One way to check whether this explanation makes any sense would be to compare the total number of cases over a period of time (rather than open cases at any given time).

Finally, you wrote that "all members are treated equally" and that's formally true but the Commission actually has a lot of leeway in choosing to bring infringement proceedings or not. For example, the Schengen area is a mess and it's recently become possible to launch infringement proceedings about these rules too but it looks like the Commission won't touch that with a ten-foot pole. Intuitively, I would have expected this discretion to work to the advantage of the bigger member states but I guess it's also possible that the Commission prioritizes what it sees as the most important issues and doesn't push as hard against newer members that already have a lot on their plate.