The Conference on the Future of Europe as a window of opportunity for regional parliaments: experiences from the German-speaking parliaments

Regional or subnational parliaments are an important, yet too often ignored component of the EU’s multi-level parliamentary system. By and large, they have become more powerful and active in EU affairs after the 2009 Lisbon Treaty leading to remarkable institutional changes in many regional parliaments. This goes especially for those regional parliaments with legislative competences, which includes the regional parliaments from the federal (Austria, Belgium, Germany) or strongly regionalized EU member states (Italy, Spain). They focused their activities strongly on the subsidiarity control Early Warning System. Yet, activities go also beyond the EWS. The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) is an example of this. The main hypothesis proposed in this contribution is that CoFoE offered a window of opportunity for institutional activism and for renewing long-standing claims for a stronger role of regions. The contribution will focus on the 27 German-speaking regional parliaments, i.e. the parliaments in the sixteen German and nine Austrian Länder plus in parliament of Ostbelgien and of South Tyrol. They are regional parliaments with legislative powers. They became active in relation to CoFoE; however, the level of activism differs among them. Regional parliaments became active in their own rights using established parliamentary tools such as resolutions, plenary debates, committee hearings, questions and sometimes also special events. The politicisation of CoFoE overall developed along the established partisan conflicts. In addition, established interparliamentary channels such as the Landespräsidentenkonferenz (conference of presidents of regional parliaments) were used to exchange views and raise demands. Competences and practices developed in EU affairs had an impact on the level of engagement. The direct involvement of some regional MPs – formally delegated to CoFoE – plus support from the Committee of the Regions for regional activities were most beneficial for regional parliamentary activities. The paper builds on first qualitative evaluations of regional parliamentary involvement conducted by the author herself plus by the RegioParl project team.