The first vice-president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, came to present his vision of the work to be done by the task force on subsidiarity and proportionality that he chairs during a debate at the Committee of the Regions (CoR) plenary on Wednesday 31 January. The local and regional elected officials broadly supported his approach.
The audience was not happy with the European Commission’s communiqué on the composition of the task force, which focussed on the fourth scenario for the future of Europe (‘doing less in a more efficient manner’) and indicated regional policy as a possible domain of disengagement (see EUROPE 11943), but Frans Timmermans seemed to calm them down and win over the assembly of local and regional elected officers.
He kept reiterating the importance of the role of territorial communities in implementing European policies. ‘We absolutely need to fully engage with people in the cities, in the villages, in the towns, in the regions they live in’ if we want to implement European policies crowned with success, he said, giving the example of waste management in a circular economy.
He pointed out the big issues to be dealt with by the EU in the next decade: ensuring citizens’ security and better management of flows of migration, going beyond the model of simply building ‘walls and barriers’, fighting ‘tribalism and nationalism’ and, finally, looking at ‘what we have to offer so that the people no longer stand with their backs to the future and look at the past that never was for a source of solutions that would never be.’
In this regard, he set out three areas of work for the task force: ‘1) The procedures we have in place today linked to subsidiarity and proportionality, are they working? – 2) What are the areas where Europe should perhaps do less to leave more to local, regional and national authorities, and what could be areas where Europe should do more and 3) How do we structurally engage the local and regional authorities in the process of law-making and implementation?
There were many CoR speakers and suggestions. María Elorza Zubiría (ALDE, Spain) called for a stronger role for the Committee of the Regions in the future by expanding the domains where its intervention is compulsory and making some of its opinions binding too. Others suggested taking the territorial dimension better into account in the European Semester budget process by introducing a code of conduct to involve the regions. One elected official regretted, however, that the European Commission appealed to the regions but at the end of the day, in practice ‘closed the doors’ to the regions and, more broadly, the centralisation trend at the Commission.
In an interview with this newsletter, the president of the Committee of the Region, Karl-Heinz Lambertz, shared his uncertainty about the task force results, stressing the problem of objectively defining the principle of subsidiarity, the paucity of planned meetings and the composition of the task force, on which there are no MEPs (see EUROPE 11950).
The principle of subsidiarity remains, however, the source of tension between the Commission and the CoR, the latter considering appealing to the European Court of Justice over a controversial announcement about changing the regulation on common measures (see related article). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)