Covid-19, the eurozone crisis and rising role conflict in the parliamentary space?

The European Council’s political deal on a collective dept scheme to help the member states to recover from the economic consequences of the Coronavirus crisis is already praised as a major step of European integration. Yet, it may also have consequence for representative democracy in the European Union, associating the European Parliament only marginally in the implementation of the scheme while giving the European Commission a still stronger grip on the budgetary competences of domestic parliaments. The state of the parliamentary democracy in the EU is dependent on what parliamentary actors on all levels of the EU’s multi-level parliamentary field make of it and how norms and backgrounds about ‘doing democracy’ are shared or contested. This article asks which ideas domestic parliamentarians themselves convey on financial solidarity and the legitimacy of representative democracy in the context of the EMU through the two successive crisis events central for recent evolutions of the EMU: the Eurozone crisis and the Covid-19 crisis. The research is based on a double approach on the discursive action and parliamentary practices of the MPs. It is based on a qualitative-quantitative analysis of parliamentary debates on the stability mechanism for the countries whose currency is the Euro and on the modification of the framework for the EU’s own resources in the lower chamber of four member states (France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands). And it analyses interviews with MPs in the Budgetary committees who are mainly responsible for following the European Semester the main instrument for the implementation of the EU’s structural instruments. The results show that that while the question of financial solidarity is dependent on the party-political stance of the MPs, the question of parliamentary participation is dependent on the institutional roles MPs play on the domestic level in budgetary affairs. The article argues that questions of institutional design and policy legitimation of the EU underlie a different cleavage structure than policy-relevant issues. This difference between polity- and policy-cleavages has gained too few attention in the literature on the macro-evolutions of the EU in recent years which has also undervalued the democratic practices of domestic actors on the domestic level as an explanatory variable.