The 2019 Elections and the Future Role of the European Parliament: Upsetting the Institutional Balance?

The 2019 elections may reverse the direction of the European political tide. Instead of injecting new blood in, and of bestowing additional authority upon, the European Parliament, the Europeanisation of the elections may prompt, paradoxically, the oppo- site effect: to establish a permanent link between the majorities in the European Par- liament and the intergovernmental Institutions, and, by so doing, to undermine the au- thority of the former to the benefit of the latter. Even more paradoxically, it may expe- dite the transformation of the European Parliament, from one of the independent branches of the European political system to a verbose Parliamentary house, controlled by the executive and deprived of a real decisional autonomy. If this were the effect of the revolutionary elections of 2019, this would be the beginning of the end of the new model of democracy that has germinated in the European laboratories.