The French Parliament and European Intergration

Through successive constitutional reforms over the past two decades, French parliamentarians have gained new rights and instruments to monitor policy-making at EU level and to exert tighter scrutiny over the executive branch. Yet the more structural and long-standing obstacles to the reparliamentarization of EU issues have not been removed, which explains why the reforms have failed to deliver the hoped-for Europeanization of parliamentary debates. While some progress has undoubtedly been made - notably with respect to MPs' access to information and expertise on EU legislative proposals - Parliament's overall influence in EU matters remains low and the innovations introduced by the Lisbon Treaty are unlikely to bring about any significant change to this state of affairs.