This paper analyzes the evolution of Commission’s policy proposals designed to increase the political feasibility of various contested aspects of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) reforms. It starts by establishing the divides among policy preferences of member states that goes beyond the basic North-South division, based on a novel dataset developed for the Horizon2020 project EMUchoices. Consequently, it matches various package deals, transition periods and tweaks in economic parameters traceable throughout these proposals to these divides, in order to tease out Commission’s approach to the consensus-building around such reforms. The analysis, which covers major documents published between 2009 and 2017, suggests that while the Commission strives to combine policies that appeal to both North and South policy coalitions, minimize any burden-sharing and backload implementation costs, the compromise remains elusive and dependent on the initiative of member states - Germany and France in particular. At the same time, the underlying feature of all Commission’s proposals is considerable increase in its own institutional powers at the expense of member states, which is unlikely to increase political feasibility of its EMU reform proposals.
