Defusing discontinuity

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering has suggested that Parliament could decide which leftover draft legislation to drop when a new European Commission takes office.

"We should try to find a solution so that the European Parliament could decide after an election which subjects we want to go on with," Pöttering said on Tuesday (13 February).

His intervention is an attempt to defuse an increasingly tense dispute between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Commission President José Manuel Barroso over ditching outstanding legislative proposals when a new Commission takes office. Merkel on Tuesday repeated her call for the so-called discontinuity principle to be applied to EU legislation during Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg. In the German law-making process, legislation left over when a new parliament is elected is automatically withdrawn. But Barroso believes that while the discontinuity principle might be appropriate in a purely parliamentary system it would not be suitable in the EU’s unique set-up where the Commission has the sole right to draft legislation. He has proposed instead that a new Commission would, on taking up office, review all unadopted legislation to see if there is sufficient political support for continuing with it. He also points out that the Commission has launched a bid to scrap outdated or redundant laws.

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering has suggested that Parliament could decide which leftover draft legislation to drop when a new European Commission takes office.