Dr. Sonia Piedrafita:

I will start with the last question. Perhaps the European Union is not doing that badly regarding the subsidiarity principle. Perhaps it is complying with its role quite well. On the occasion you mentioned, the Danish national parliament was very active in convincing, through interparliamentary co-operation, all the national parliaments to cite it and to send a negative reasoned opinion. That is very difficult to do and it is not likely to happen. It was an exceptional circumstance. National parliaments carry out the subsidiarity checks on the proposals on which they want to carry them out so, first, it is difficult to see how they all decide to carry out the checks on the same proposal. Indeed, the Commission publishes a report explaining which proposals were subject to a subsidiarity check and many of them do not receive a subsidiarity check by more than two or three member states, so that also makes it difficult to happen. There is a third factor, which is the way national parliaments work. In many member states they have a majority supporting their governments so it is very unlikely that if a government votes for something in the Council the national parliament will say that it does not comply with the subsidiarity principle, because it is their own party that has the majority in most cases in the national parliament. That is the third reason it only happened once, but I was even very surprised that it happened once. It was a sign that it can happen again and it is an alarm bell for the Commission that it can happen, so it must do better.

Regarding the weight of the big parties among the European Union political parties-----