Euroscepticism puts the European internal market in crisis – the public procurement perspective

The paper is about the tension between the objectives of the European public procurement law through a “buy national” objective of domestic economic patriotism, which translates into discriminating because of nationality. The undercurrent of Euroscepticism has caused a research to identify whether and how different legal systems of Member States addressed the issue of invoking selected TFEU derogations when implementing the 2014 public procurement directives: at the time of propagating anti-EU political agendas, reform of the public procurement directives was conducted to take effect in the domestic legislation of the Member State in 2016. The idea behind establishing the internal market was efficient use of resources within the whole of Europe and that was meant to eliminate autarky and, therefore, protectionism. At the same time the political dimension of European integration was a crucial aspect, which, if neglected, could cause the process to fail. The paper analyses if, in the current political context, there is a novel dimension of discriminatory practices: a systemic limiting of access to government contracts by referring at the domestic level to sensitive reasons of public policy or national security to do with some sort of notion of sovereignty but in relation to civil procurements.