Parliamentary Scrutiny of Budgetary Emergency Measures: From the Great Financial Crisis to the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the last fifteen years, EU Member States have experienced some epochal crisis, which have deeply challenged the governance in the economic and financial sectors and the relationship between decision-makers. Executive dominance has represented a common answer to the two major crises, the Great Financial Crisis started in 2007 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Under both circumstances, increased intergovernmentalism at the EU level has further emphasised the role played by national governments at the domestic level. Symmetrically, the role of parliaments has been seriously challenged. In reaction to these trends, only the economic governance shaped in response to the Great Financial Crisis, but not the recovery governance associated to the Covid-19 outbreak, includes formal references to the scrutiny role of National Parliaments. The article tries to assess what type of influence is this formal asymmetry exercising on the current practices of parliamentary involvement in the fundamental stages of the economic and of the recovery governance. The comparative overview seems to confirm that the Covid-19 pandemic see a general weakening of the NPs participatory framework in strategic budgetary and economic decision-making. The increasing asymmetries between national practices are framed in the broader picture of the scrutiny tools available to each national assembly in the field of EU affairs.