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Democratic Implications of the Treaty of Lisbon
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the co-decision procedure, and renaming it the ordinary legislative
procedure (Art. 289 & Art. 294, TFEU). The Treaty of Lisbon
brought over 40 new areas under this procedure, including
agriculture, services, energy policy, asylum and immigration, and
the structural and cohesion funds (Art. 43.22, TFEU; Art. 56,
TFEU; Art. 77-80, TFEU; Art. 177, TFEU).
The multi-faceted role of the European Parliament in the
debate over the democratic deficit can sometimes be self-
contradictory. On the one hand, the deficit is considered
attributable to the weakness of the European Parliament
—
had the
European Parliament enjoyed more substantial legislative power
and democratic control over the Commission and the Council,
concerns raised over the growth in executive power at the expense
of national parliamentary control would have been eased. On the
other hand, the legitimacy of the European Parliament is
problematic mainly due to its remoteness and the disconnectedness
of MEPs from their electorates. To the extent that this concern is
valid, the empowerment of the EP risks aggravating rather than
alleviating the democratic deficit.
Hence, for those who are uneasy with the legislative power of
the EP, parliamentary democracy has proven a flawed mechanism
for tackling the EU’s democratic deficit. By failing to address the
European Parliament’s legitimacy problem while firmly embedding
the power of the EP in the ordinary legislative procedures of EU
political system, the Treaty of Lisbon is likely to have negative
effects on European democracy. The ruling of the Federal
Constitutional Court of Germany, for instance, stresses that the
Treaty of Lisbon does not change the fact that the EU lacks “a
political decision-making body which has come into being by equal
election of all citizens of the Union and which is able to uniformly
represent the will of the people.” The Treaty leaves the Union in
need of “a system of organization of political rule in which a will
of the European majority carries the formation of the government
in such a way that the will goes back to free and equal electoral