EU legislative process is not fit for electoral campaigns Dear readers, Welcome to EU Elections Decoded, your essential guide for staying up to date and receiving exclusive insights about the upcoming EU elections. Editor’s Take: EU legislation is not fit for electoral campaigns “The vote is never the last vote” – is what you can often hear in the so-called Brussels bubble when following the legislative path of an EU file.
The current EU legislative process is extremely tiring and long, with many stages of approval over a long period of time. In the best scenario, from the adoption by the European Commission to the publication in the EU journal, a law goes through a negotiation period of one year to a year and a half. This best scenario period of EU negotiations is a lifetime for real-world electoral dynamics. In addition, complicated files usually take more than a year and a half of negotiations, and can even exceed the five years of the EU legislative mandate. Therefore, it can happen that after reaching an agreement among EU institutions, a group of member states can change their mind and try to block a file, for instance, for domestic electoral purposes, when EU ministers and the European Parliament have to formally approve the interinstitutional agreement. This is what is happening in Germany with the liberals. According to Handelsblatt, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), in coalition with the Greens and the Socialists in the government, has the intention to block almost 14 legislative EU files before the end of the mandate. Most of the files regard sensitive issues on sustainability and employment, such as the EU Corporate Due Diligence Directive, the rules for platform workers, and the laws on other Green Deal files. According to the rules of the tripartite coalition, if one political party opposes a vote in Brussels, the whole government has to abstain or vote against it. In addition, Germany is a country whose move is often followed by many others, as was the case with the EU Corporate Due Diligence Directive last Friday (9 February).
FDP, which is currently not performing well in the polls, is deliberately blocking strategic EU legislation for electoral purposes, in a move that could in one second waste years of negotiations on challenging matters, delaying their approval for years. The EU is often mentioned as a global example for legislation rather than for EU politics. Because, compared to other continents, it has progressive legislation, such as in the field of data protection or, from now, on Artificial Intelligence regulation – the first such continent-wide law in the world. However, if this pattern is maintained, the EU risks losing this primacy and also failing to deliver laws after ‘long and stressful’ negotiations. The EU legislative path needs to be reformed, at least to make it more sustainable for the staff involved in the negotiations. This is unlikely to happen in the next legislative mandate, given the expected surge of the far-right that is usually against any changes within EU institutions. With that in mind, are German liberals really ready to set this precedent in the EU? We will have a definite answer when Europeans head to the polls in June. | 