VI. NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS AND
EUROPEAN DECISION-MAKING
DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Professor Christine Neuhold,
Maastricht University
Parliaments perform key tasks in democracies. These reach from scrutinising the work of the government to debating topical issues. The Coronavirus disease has led to lockdowns around the world since early 2020 and this not only once but several times. Measures undertaken by Member States have had an unprecedented impact on public life (Neuhold 2020).
This contribution comes in here and will first examine the question how the covid pandemic (or Corona crisis) has actually affected national parliaments in European Union (EU) Member States. This (brief) tour de force will then enable us to set the scene for the main question of this contribution: How did national parliaments engage with the EU decision-making process since the outbreak of the pandemic? This question will inter alia be answered by looking at the role of national parliaments in the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
1. Setting the scene: The EU's poly-crisis and the impact on national parliaments in EU Member States
The Covid-19 pandemic is but the latest among a series of crises that have confronted the EU almost relentlessly over the past two decades. Former Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker described this situation as a “polycrisis”, stressing that “our various challenges - from the security threats in our neighbourhood and at home, to the refugee crisis, and to the UK referendum - have not only arrived at the same time. They also feed each other, creating a sense of doubt and uncertainty in the minds of our people.”(Juncker 2016).
Crises are seen to pose serious threats to the core values of a social system, often in unprecedented and even unconceivable ways (Rosenthal et.al. 2001:6). It is therefore unsurprising that in such circumstances output legitimacy (policy performance) is greatly prioritized, to the detriment of both input legitimacy (citizens representation, stakeholder and parliamentary consultation) as well as important aspects of throughput legitimacy (transparency openness, inclusiveness, and accountability) (Schmidt 2021). The EU's permanent crisis-fighting raises important questions of democratic legitimacy.
So how has the pandemic then affected key players within democratic systems, in this case national parliaments within EU Member States? Especially within the EU, legislatures are seen have shown both their “resilience and adaptative capacity in the time of coronavirus”. This point was established by a Franco-Israeli team of scholars who analysed 160 countries around the world. The coronavirus thus has not “killed parliaments in countries where these institutions were present, old, and functioning” (Rozenberg 2020:3). There are still some exceptions to this. One of the most notable examples is Hungary, where the Government announced that it would rule by decree for an indefinite period. Based on a law passed by the Hungarian parliament on 30 March 2020, the government can extend the state of emergency indefinitely. The bill also introduced prison sentences of up to five years for spreading misinformation, hindering a governmental response to the pandemic. This has caused the Chair of the EP Civil Liberties Committee to express his concern. While Member states have a responsibility to take protective measures in these hard times, fundamental rights, rule of law and democratic principles should be upheld (Neuhold 2020). The same can be said of Serbia or North Macedonia. As Rozenberg points out such regimes were already suffering from the phenomenon of “democratic backlash”. Authoritarian leaders were already there, and they simply seized the window of opportunity opened by the pandemic to strengthen their role (Rozenberg 2020).
An in-depth study comparative study of the relationship between the executive and legislative, also conducted at the outset of the pandemic shows as well that parliaments have reacted “heterogeneously” to the crisis. After the first “hard” lockdowns - and in some Member States also closures of parliaments (such as Belgium) - some of the “normal/usual” oversight practices have gradually been reinstated. In other parliaments, scrutinizing the government has taken centre stage in order to curb executive dominance. Parliaments then came up with pragmatic and innovative solutions such as video conferencing etc. This was especially the case in countries that can count on a long-standing parliamentary tradition, as in the case of the French and British parliaments (Griglio 2020). This again confirms the assumption that parliaments that are firmly rooted within governance processes were able to face the crisis more robustly.
We will now move from the national level to the EU arena to see how national parliaments engaged with the EU in the face of this multi-facetted crisis. Here we zoom on the establishment of the recovery fund for Europe, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). This RRF is seen to be at the heart of the EU's crisis response.
2. The interaction of national parliaments with the EU level during the crisis: the example of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)
A major concern regarding the role of national parliaments in the realm fiscal and economic affairs is that their room for manoeuvre would be reduced by European rules and regulations. In the Covid-19 crisis, national parliaments saw themselves marginalised by their own governments: Major decisions were being taken by the Heads of State or Government in the European Council (Kreilinger 2020). National parliaments can thus not be seen as having been at the centre of the debates on the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) (Kreilinger 2020:12). Major decisions were taken by European Council, which is seen to be upgraded in times of crisis. The initial breakthrough came at the European Council meeting of 23 April 2020 where the Commission was asked to develop a recovery fund. It then presented its proposal on 28 May 2020. This tool has been coupled with the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). Together these mechanisms amount total of € 1.8 trillion.
The RRF is linked to the European Semester. Note that in order to get access to RRF funds, Member States must submit National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs). Here they have to come up with convincing proposals that tackle economic reform and propose public investment projects. Main choices of how the funding will be allocated are thus made at Member State level. There is a clear potential for better parliamentary scrutiny of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), compared to the previous National Reform Programmes of the European Semester, simply because more is at stake (Kreilinger 2020). According to the European Trade Union Institute it would make sense to broaden the accountability of RRF management to the European Parliament and social partners at the national or European level. This would confer long-lasting momentum on European integration (Creel et.al. 2021).
National parliaments also had to ratify Own Resources Decision (ORD), which establishes how the EU budget is financed. This was a pre- condition for the launch of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery instrument. NextGenerationEU is a temporary recovery instrument which can raise up to €750 billion in 2018 prices or some € 800 billion by way of bonds being issued432(*). The entry into force of the ORD requires approval by all EU Member States according to their constitutional requirements. In a majority of Member States, it is the national parliament that is responsible for ratification of the decision. In the others, the government alone decides on the approval433(*). Here it is the government that decides to ratify of the decision and then the parliament is informed and may hold a vote that is not binding.
There was a great sense of urgency for the ORD to be ratified, since otherwise the NGEU recovery instrument would not come into force. The objective was to complete the ratification procedure before summer 2021, with a view to ensuring the timely launch of NGEU. Note that of the 20 national parliaments that had to ratify the ORD, all did so and did so quickly. All Member States have now ratified the ORD and notified the Council accordingly before the end of May 2021. Therefore, on 1 June 2021, the new ORD entered into force, enabling the Commission to start borrowing resources for the recovery instrument (Creel et.al. 2021).
When it comes to the question of how national parliaments interacted with the EU level more generally, one has to say that national parliaments concentrated mainly on reorganising themselves in light of the pandemic and focussed on holding their government to account. We see that national parliaments did not resort much to the so-called Lisbon tools. They did not engage with the Early Warning System, which enables national parliaments to collectively signal a violation of the subsidiarity principle in EU draft legislation to the European Commission (Auel and Neuhold 2017). No yellow cards have thus been issued since the onset of the pandemic (with the last one being issued in 2016).
3. Where to go from here?
The pandemic had great impact on the way national parliaments work, but in general they stood strong. Only in Member States where democratic and parliamentary traditions were less well established, did the executive get the upper hand and shut down parliamentary control. In a majority of EU parliaments, MPs found ways to debate - at least the most important crisis measures - and met online, once the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020.
We see however that the focus of parliamentary control was on the national level rather than on the European arena. National parliaments seem to have become active when they really had to, for example during the ratification of the Own Resources Decision but were removed from the debates on the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
They made little use of the mechanisms of parliamentary control foreseen by the Lisbon Treaty and did not issue any yellow cards for example.
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REFERENCES Auel, K. and Neuhold, C (2017) Multi-arena players in the making? Conceptualizing the role of national parliaments since the Lisbon Treaty, Journal of European Public Policy https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2016.1228694 Creel, J., Leron, N. Ragot, X. and Saraceno, F. (2021) Embedding the Recovery and Resilience Facility into the European Semester Macroeconomic coordination gains and democratic limits, ETUI Policy Brief, European parliament research service (2021) national ratification of the own resources decision: procedure completed on 31 may 2021 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2021)690520 Griglio, E. (2020): Parliamentary oversight under the Covid-19 emergency: striving against executive dominance, The Theory and Practice of Legislation https://doi.org/10.1080/20508840.2020.1789935 Kreilinger. V. (2020) Tectonic shifts in the EU's institutional system, LUISS, Working Paper Series SOG-WP62/2020 ISSN: 2282-4189 Juncker, J.C. (2026) Speech by President Jean-Claude Juncker at the Annual General Meeting of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) Athens, 21 June 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH_16_2293 Neuhold, C. (2020) European Parliaments in Times of Coronavirus, E-International Relations Blog https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/18/european-parliaments-in-times-of-coronavirus/ Rosenthal, U, Boin, A and Comfort, L (eds) Managing Crises: Threats, Dilemmas, Opportunities, Charles Thomas Publisher Ltd. Rozenberg, O (2020) Post Pandemic Legislatures. Is real democracy possible with virtual parliaments? 2020. hal-02934718 Schmidt, Vivien (2020), Europe's Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford University Press). |
* 432 https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/eu-budget/eu-borrower-investor-relations/nextgenerationeu_en
* 433 In seven it was the government Solvenia, Slowakia, Malta, Cypris, Latvia. Ireland and Czech Republic