The EU Commission: the winner of the COVID-19 crisis?

It is an old wisdom in politics that you should “never let a good crisis go to waste”. Public policy theories have confirmed this wisdom may times; as existing policies prove insufficient, there is a window of opportunity for more radical changes (e.g. Baumgartner and Jones, Sabatier). But beyond the adoption of new and perhaps radical policy alternatives, crises also provide a window of opportunity for institutions to plead for a reallocation of power. In the European context, this typically entails policies being lifted to the European level. In this paper, we further investigate this process by closing in on the European Commission. As the vanguard of European integration, it has often pleaded for stronger supranational powers, and research on everyday European politics shows that it does not shy away from promoting its own interest (Brandsma & Blom-Hansen 2010) or pursuing more autonomy (Brandsma & Blom-Hansen 2017). Yet, for actual delegation of powers to the Commission, the assent of the European Parliament and the member states in the Council is needed. Does the Corona crisis provide a window of opportunity for the European Commission to strengthen its own position? And how can we explain the degree of integration that results from this? This paper presents a first cut at answering this question. It looks at all Commission proposals presented after the COVID-crisis started, and investigates to what degree it uses the crisis as an argument for expanding its own regulatory power.