The European Parliament and the Covid 19 pandemic: which impact on the balance of power within the assembly?

The current pandemic has had an impact on the way EU institutions work, both on the organizational aspects and on the decision-making process. Indeed, they had to put new procedures in place to ensure the continuity of their work and they had to act quickly to adopt strategies and legislative measures to address the challenges of the pandemic as well as its social and economic consequences. In this paper, we will focus on the European Parliament (EP) in order to examine the impact of the measures taken to ensure the institution can work virtually has had on the balance of power within the institution. More particularly, we expect that the trend towards a greater empowerment of the political groups and the hierarchical organs of the EP has been strengthened since the beginning of the pandemic. This paper will rely on qualitative interviews with actors of the political groups in order to test our hypothesis.