Domestic Parliamentary Control Over the European Council and Eurozone Summits: The Case of Portugal

In the period following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the prominence and political leverage of the Heads of State and Government have risen considerably. Their meetings within the European Council and the summits of the Eurozone have become the venue for some of the EU’s most important decisions, especially in the context of the ongoing sovereign debt crisis. Yet their accountability is predominantly of a domestic character.

Using the Portuguese Assembly of the Republic as a case study, we examine a series of questions related to the parliamentary function of political control over the activities of the European Council and Eurozone summits. On the one hand, we examine which legal rules govern this function, what information Parliament may access, what procedures and instruments exist for ex ante and ex post control, and which Parliament and Government bodies are involved in it. On the other hand, we conduct an empirical analysis of the contents of the plenary debates that were held from March 2011 to March 2012 in order to verify whether the available parliamentary powers are actually used in practice, whether the Euro crisis has a motivational effect on MPs, and what the effect of parliamentary control is on the Government’s stability and the domestic enforcement of European Council decisions.

Given the executive nature of the European Council and Eurozone summits, these questions are of paramount importance both for the accountability of the participants in these forums and for legitimising and delegitimising their decisions. The case of Portugal is one of the optimal examples for this type of inquiry. It is a Eurozone Member State that has received bailout funds, it has suffered the fall of a Government, it has witnessed a strict austerity programme and vivid parliamentary debates about it, and has amended Parliament’s prerogatives in monitoring the action of the European Council.