La rappresentanza politica e la legittimità democratica in Europa: il trattato di Lisbona e l’early warning system

The debates that preceded the Lisbon Treaty (2009), still marked by the failure of the Constitutional Treaty (2004), were strongly influenced by the intention to take a further step forward in building a political Europe. And this intention is evident both in a number of provisions in the current Treaty - such as Article 8-A TEU, which states that the functioning of the Union is based on representative democracy - and in the multiplicity of practices and methods developed to increase the political legitimacy of the institutions - such as the Barroso Procedure. The Lisbon Treaty went further, attributing a series of powers to the European Parliament (and extending some of them it already possessed), most of which fall within the classic parliamentary powers of information, scrutiny and legislative construction - in the latter case, consisting of participation as co-legislator with the Council in the Ordinary Legislative Procedure. But, in addition to this, in 2014, an attempt was made to establish the practice of the Spitzenkandidaten, i.e. to appoint to the presidency of the European Commission the main candidate of the European political party that had obtained the highest number of seats in Parliament. Unfortunately, this practice, which would have brought the political system in Europe and the parliamentary political systems of the individual member states closer together, ended up not being repeated after the 2019 elections. The Treaty, always having as its premise the attempt to resolve the problem of input legitimacy, also took into consideration the issue of strengthening national parliaments, granting them some relevant competences, so as to bring them closer to European decision-making. The logic was very simple: since national parliaments were endowed with a considerable degree of legitimacy, making them participants in the decision-making process in Europe guaranteed the latter a greater degree of legitimacy. This would be a kind of bottom-up transmission of democratic legitimacy. In this sequence of events, the Early Warning System, which is nothing more than an elaborate system for monitoring compliance with the principle of subsidiarity in Europe (Art. 5(3) TEU), was created. Through this system, each Parliament of each Member State would have two votes (in the case of the bicameral systems, one vote for each Chamber), and the reasoned opinions expressed by them, drawing a certain threshold, would activate the yellow card (1/3 of the votes) or the orange card (majority of the votes), obliging the European Commission to re-examine the matter of law and to justify itself - in the latter case, before the European Parliament and the Council. It is not, therefore, a veto mechanism, but a sort of instrument of preventive alert, which in a certain way ends up integrating itself fully into the dialogic and polycentric spirit of the European multi-level system and the "Euro-national parliamentary system". Summing up, in the present Work, the evolution and expectations of the post-Lisbon Treaty have been analysed, more specifically in the context of the coveted strengthening of European and national Parliaments, democratic legitimacy and politics in the European Union, as opposed to the historical intergovernmental, bureaucratic and technical dominance that occurs there.