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Democratic Implications of the Treaty of Lisbon
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Since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, 472 draft
legislative acts have been sent to national parliaments for
subsidiarity scrutiny (European Parliament, 2014d: 2). Thus far,
the yellow card procedure under the Early Warning Mechanism of
the Treaty of Lisbon has been triggered only twice. On May 2012,
the procedure was triggered for the first time when 18 votes of
national parliaments out of 54 in EU-27 objected to the legislative
proposal regarding common EU rules on the right to strike
(so-called
Monti II
proposal).
Monti II
was controversial because it
restricted workers’ right to strike and was seen as a case of
“infiltration of competition law into national labor law,” raising
alarms among national parliaments that the regulation would
undermine the integrity of domestic labor markets and risk a race
to the bottom (Goldoni, 2014: 102-103). This yellow card resulted
in the withdrawal by the Commission of the
Monti II
proposal.
Several factors contributed to the success of the triggering of the
first yellow card warning. The Danish parliament’s early decision
to oppose
Monti II
and encourage other national parliaments to do
the same played a key role. Once an alliance was formed, national
parliaments kept each other up to date about where the vote count
stood as the deadline approached through networks such as
COSAC (a twice-yearly meeting of EU affairs committees of
national parliaments and the EP) and NPRs (National Parliament
Representatives in Brussels) (Cooper, 2013: 2).
In September, three months after the issuance of the yellow
card, the Commission withdrew the
Monti II
proposal. The
manner with which the Commission withdrew the proposal,
however, raised some eyebrows. Rather than addressing
individually each of the 18 national parliaments which had filed
reasoned opinions, the Commission sent 18 identical letters. The
Commission insisted that the principle of subsidiarity had
not
been
infringed upon and stressed that it was withdrawing the proposal
not
because of the yellow card, but because the proposal was
unlikely to gain enough support in Parliament and the Council to