The Spanish parliamentary activism in the CoFoE: prioritising the EU level over national politics

The paper analyses the ways in which the Spanish parliament and Senate contributed to the CoFoE, the extent to which politicisation emerged and party-political divisions emerged, as well as the appearance of Spanish parliamentary ‘political entrepreneurs’. While the paper dives in the Spanish bicameral dynamics, which illustrate the rather limited involvement on the CoFoE of Spanish parliamentary actors, it also identifies and describes the political entrepreneurship of parliamentary actors at the EU level. Among them we find Domènec Ruiz Devesa, the leading MEP on CoFoE within the S&D group, and Iratxe García Pérez, the leader of the EU S&D group. Both of them were active through the CoFoE at the EU level, yet this activism was largely missing at the national level. Additionally, even though there was not much CoFoE-related discussion or politicisation at the national level, its follow-up became one of the priorities of the Spanish presidency in the first half of 2024. Thus, the paper argues that the Spanish political involvement in the CoFoE prioritised the EU level over national politics.