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"The difference between the parliament and those who take the real decisions is very clear to the citizens."
These words of Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, delivered in a recent interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, are simultaneously infuriating and true. They also go right to the main issue in EU politics ahead of this month’s elections to the European Parliament: where does real power lie? With the parliament or, as in the past, with the European Council – the heads of state and government – just as Mr Van Rompuy so succinctly put it?
The biggest irony of the EU is that with every new treaty the formal powers of parliament have increased, yet in reality the council is becoming ever stronger. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has also lost power and standing. This power shift raises three questions: why did it happen; does it matter; and is it reversible?
So why did it happen? The formal answer is bad luck. The eurozone crisis was the dominating event of the past five years. The European treaties did not empower the EU’s institutions to do anything relevant, such as create new mechanisms or replace unworkable rules with new ones. The council was left to fill this power vacuum by default. This formal explanation is misleading, however. Real power is not formal power. The failure over the past five years has been intellectual. When crisis struck, Europe’s institutions were off-script.
Does it matter? I think so. The council has proved more flexible in the crisis than I expected, but it has fallen well short of what it needed to do. All it did was to agree the minimum required to keep the show on the road. A voter backlash against this amorphous political cloud called Brussels should not be surprising.
Is the power shift reversible? Until recently, I thought it might be. After the recent banking union fiasco, I am no longer so confident. The council agreed on legislation for a bank resolution fund in December. The legislation then duly moved to the parliament, and then to an inter-institutional conciliation process. That is where the parliament caved in. The draft of the legislation as originally agreed by the council had flaws. Many were irritating. One was fatal. It was the lack of a provision to deal with a contagious banking crisis, which was the whole point of the legislation. Instead of challenging the council on this one important issue, the Parliament focused on the other, minor points of disagreement and declared victory. Several MEPs are now claiming that taxpayers no longer have to bail out banks. That is absolutely not true. For me, they lost their credibility at this moment.