Over the last few years, EU governance has taken place in crisis modus with Member States and European institutions representatives literally moving from one crisis to the next from the Euro to the refugee and now to the existential crisis. In this paper, I content that starting with the Euro crisis, going through the refugee crisis and now in the current existential crisis the European Commission has experienced a subtle disempowerment. This paper focuses in three different dimensions of disempowerment: tasks, issues and capabilities. First, during the Euro crisis there was a gradual transfer of decision making power and resources away from the Commission to the intergovernmental level and to the European Central Bank. Second, during the refugee crises, the European Commission took a low profile and was unable to take a leadership role, with tasks and issues being informally re-transferred to the national level. Third, before the beginning of the Brexit negotiations, the division of labour between the Commission and the Council in the negotiations clearly disempowered the Commission in terms of tasks, issues and capabilities. Fourth, the decision of the president’s Commission Jean-Claude Juncker to reduce the number of staff during his mandate further weakens the position of the Commission in terms of capabilities within the European institutional triangle.
