Increasingly politically costly EU decisions have challenged the dynamics of decision-making in Brussels and have renewed the opportunities for national political parties to engage with EU issues, formally – through direct interventions in decision-making, or informally – as a by-product of national political contestation. This paper adds to academic work on the role of national political parties in EU decision-making by looking comparatively at the involvement of political parties in the UK and Germany in the negotiations of the Fiscal Compact. The analysis corroborates evidence from EU documents with observations from qualitative interviews with national party members and EU officials. The paper finds that national intra-party conflicts and coalition politics determined the format of the Compact and the options available in terms of crisis measures.These findings speak to the larger debates on the role of national political parties as non-state actors in EU decision-making and the politicisation of EU decisions.
