Re-politicisation of European Economic Governance through the involvement of parliaments and social partners

Over the past decade, EU scholars have demonstrated how national policymaking in economic and social policy domains became increasingly shaped by the European level of governance (Bekker, 2015; Maricut&Puetter, 2018). A transfer of competences occurred mainly via singular episodes, such as the financial crises 2008/09 and the pandemic 2020/21, aiming to stabilise the monetary union and the single market. Thus, macroeconomic coordination became more effective by integrating soft‐governed policy issues, such as labour market and social policy, into the regime of hard‐governed fiscal policy (Bekker, 2020; Saurugger&Terpan 2020). Furthermore, a new financial instrument was established in 2021, called the Recovery and Resilience Facility (Regulation 2021/241), to facilitate, inter alia, national reforms in line with Commission’s policy guidelines. The noteworthy changes enhanced the discretionary authority of the Commission and the ECOFIN‐Council to push for structural reforms in EU member states by addressing macroeconomic imbalances (Bauer&Becker, 2014). The Council has neglected democratic consequences of these reforms that have increased the efficiency and effectiveness of European Economic Governance (EEG) at the expense of sovereign policymaking in member states (Schmidt, 2015). So far, the EEG lacks political accountability due to an intransparent and mainly technocratic policy coordination. On one hand, national parliament’s legislative sovereignty came under pressure, due to the negative conditionality of a sanction‐based policy coordination. On the other hand, the European parliament is not involved as such, although the negotiation on the Recover and Resilience Facility opened some windows of opportunity. The paper starts with discussing why the European Commission could enhance its role as a policy entrepreneur under a de‐politicized EEG (Zeilinger, 2021; Bressanelli et al., 2020). Furthermore, it examines how an increasing involvement of parliaments would politicize the EEG. More specifically, it asks about the consequences of this politicisation on the national legislative procedure and the involvement of civil society.