The European Parliament has warned the Commission it could take it to court over its plan to bypass elected lawmakers to create a €150 billion loan programme to boost defence spending across the bloc.
Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, issued her warning on Tuesday in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, her counterpart at the EU’s executive, in which she urges the Commission to change the legal basis to set up the SAFE programme.
The Commission has invoked Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) to set up SAFE which allows member states to directly approve a Commission proposal “if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products” or if a member state is “seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control”.
With SAFE, the Commission plans to raise up to €150 billion on the market to then loan the money to member states for defence investments. The programme is a key plank of the Commission’s ‘Readiness 2030’ proposal that aims to see hundreds of billions of euros invested into defence across the EU before the end of the decade, when some intelligence agencies believe Russia could be in a position to attack a European country.
In her letter, seen by Euronews, Metsola stresses that the Parliament’s legal affairs committee (JURI) “unanimously decided” at a meeting last month that Article 122 “is not the appropriate legal basis for the proposal regulation”.
“The European Parliament is not questioning the merits of this proposal for a regulation,” Metsola adds, but is instead “deeply concerned” that its adoption without a proper legal basis would be “putting at risk democratic legitimacy by undermining Parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions”.
She calls on von der Leyen “to reconsider the choice of legal basis for this proposal” so that both co-legislators are involved and warns that if the Council adopts the regulation using Article 122, Parliament will “examine” its right to bring its case to the EU’s Court of Justice.
A Commission spokesperson told Euronews that the EU executive “will always be available to explain why Article 122 TFEU has been chosen as the appropriate legal basis”.
“Europe faces an unprecedented security threat,” Thomas Regnier also said. “As stated by President von der Leyen in her Political Guidelines, Article 122 will only be used in exceptional circumstances, as the ones we are currently living in.”
Andrius Kubilius, the Commissioner for Defence and Space, told lawmakers on the Security and Defence Committee (SEDE) on Monday that the Council could approve the regulation by the end of the month.
Member states would then have two months to put in their requests, with the Commission then allowed four months to examine them. This would suggest the first disbursements under SAFE could be made before the end of the year.
Article 122 was previously also used by the Commission to react swiftly to the COVID-19 pandemic and to speed up the permits for renewable energy during the height of the energy crisis.
