The European Council: National leaders in EU law-making

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By Edoardo Bressanelli, Christel Koop, Francesca Minetto, and Christine Reh

The European Council is supposed to be an agenda-setter and crisis manager. But it also regularly intervenes in the legislative process.

The European Council is known primarily as a strategic agenda-setter, crisis-manager, and constitutional authority. However, it also has a largely unknown side: In this article, we introduce a European Council that routinely and assertively intervenes in the EU’s everyday decision-making.

National heads of state or government, the European Commission president, and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy regularly meet in summits. The first European Council summit happened 50 years ago, in March 1975. Since 2009, these high-level meetings have been chaired and prepared by a permanent European Council president. Summits can be formal or informal; formal summits produce so-called ‘conclusions’. These conclusions are not legally binding but report national leaders’ agreed positions on issues of high relevance for the Union and its citizens. In addition, the conclusions regularly mention specific pieces of legislation and ‘mandate’ the EU’s other institutions and member states to act on these laws.

How often does the European Council intervene in legislation?

In a joint research project, we have looked at the 1999-2024 period and analysed more than 2,500 pieces of legislation – pending, concluded, or withdrawn under the ordinary legislative procedure (OLP, or co-decision). We also drew on 106 summit conclusions and on interviews with national and EU-level decision-makers who helped us better understand the preparation of conclusions and their follow-up in ‘downstream’ legislation.

Out of the 2,585 laws analysed, the European Council mentions about 17% in its conclusions. In total numbers, the leaders mention 451 laws between one and 13 times; they refer to 168 laws once, mention 53 laws and 23 laws three and five times respectively, and refer to 12 laws more than 10 times.

The European Council mandates EU institutions and member states

The national leaders use mandates to the EU’s other institutions and the member states frequently and across all policy stages. Under ‘policy proposal’, leaders ‘call for’ or ‘invite’ new legislation from the European Commission; since 1999, they have mandated the Commission 216 times.

Under what we call ‘policy acknowledgement’, leaders ‘encourage’, ‘note’ or ‘welcome’ legislation; this happened 352 times. Under ‘policy decision’, the European Council ‘urges’, ‘expects adoption’, and asks the co-legislators – the Council of the EU and the European Parliament – to ‘speed up’. With more than 850 calls, this is the most mandated stage.

Finally, under ‘policy implementation’, leaders call for the national implementation of EU law. Since 1999, leaders have asked the European Commission and member states 186 times to ensure compliance.

What types of law does the European Council mention?

We draw on established approaches and our own coding, updated to 2024, to distinguish four types. Redistributive laws reallocate funds; distributive laws deal with funds but do not reallocate; regulatory laws impose constraints and opportunities, in particular on actors in the single market; procedural constituent laws set the rules for policymaking. Whilst the European Council refers to all four types, redistributive laws are most likely to be mentioned. Such laws reallocate money. Money comes from member state budgets, and national leaders, we argue, will want to control how their funds are being spent.

We also distinguish between ‘expansive’ and ‘non-expansive’ laws. Expansive legislation increases the level, the scope, or the inclusiveness of EU action. One well-known recent example is the 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act. The European Council references expansive laws frequently: 27% of expansive laws are mentioned against only 10% of non-expansive laws. Similarly, the Commission prioritises expansive laws in its own legislative agenda-setting.

If heads of state or government are perceived as defenders of national interest, the frequent mention of expansive legislation should puzzle us. We propose two potential explanations: either the European Council and the European Commission jointly try to ‘push’ or ‘promote’ these laws, or the European Council aims to break an impasse if legislation seems gridlocked.

Is the European Council a crisis-manager?

The European Council publicly and visibly addresses economic, political, security, and societal crises. Summit agendas are often crisis-focused, and leaders are much more likely to mention crisis-related laws than ‘standard’ pieces of legislation. Indeed, 37% of crisis legislation features in the summit conclusions compared to 14% of non-crisis legislation. The three crises referred to most frequently in relative terms are energy, asylum and migration, and the Ukraine invasion.

On this basis, we argue that the European Council does not only (attempt to) visibly manage crises in Brussels. Instead, national leaders regularly combine high-level crisis politics with interventions into everyday legislative responses to crises.

Legislative priorities: Cooperation or competition with the Commission?

In the preparation of summits, the European Commission is consulted on, and discusses, the European Council’s draft agenda and draft conclusions with the European Council president and their cabinet. During summits, the Commission president directly interacts with the leaders. We therefore ask whether the legislative priorities expressed in the Commission’s annual work programmes and in the European Council’s summit conclusions are closely aligned. They are not.

Our findings show that more than 60% of EU legislation is not prioritised by either the European Council or the Commission. Less than 5% are shared priorities; more than 20% are prioritised by the Commission only; and less than 10% are European Council priorities.

We make two suggestions for why this is the case. First, the European Commission could explicitly ‘request’ mandates as high-level support when legislative proposals are ‘stuck’. Second, the Commission president seems to ‘use’ the summits themselves to explore options with national leaders. Overall, and in stark contrast to the European Parliament, the Commission seems to be more at ease with the European Council’s assertiveness and intervention.

Are summit conclusions legally binding or political commitments?

The European Council’s conclusions, including their scope and role, have been challenged before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). A study published for the European Parliament in 2024 explains that holding the European Council judicially accountable is challenging: The treaty articles on the European Council are relatively imprecise, the EU is a multi-level system, there are strict standing rules, and, usually, decision-making is consensual.

Nevertheless – and similar to an argument by the Council’s General Secretariat – the CJEU has stated that summit conclusions are not legally binding but commit actors politically. In two cases – on the market stability reserve (Case C-5/16) brought by Poland and on refugee relocation (joined cases C-643/15 and C-647/15) brought by Slovakia and Hungary –, it explicitly reined in the European Council’s power to set guidelines in EU law-making.

Indeed, the court argued that conclusions cannot de facto change the majority rule in the Council of the EU under co-decision. The CJEU did (try to) limit the leaders’ ability to interfere with the inter-institutional balance in the legislative process. Yet, these judgments have not deterred the European Council from providing direction via mandates to the other EU institutions and to the member states.

Conclusions

Our research shows a European Council that is involved in everyday law-making, and assertively so. National leaders mention about 17% of EU legislation in their summit conclusions; in particular, they mention laws that redistribute funds, expand EU competences, and are crisis-related. On the laws mentioned, the European Council acts assertively across all policy stages and explicitly mandates the EU’s other institutions – especially the co-legislators.

Do these frequent interventions across the policy process matter for the balance of power within the EU? The European Council is a singularly powerful and visible actor, with extensive authority in Brussels. Some observers, academic and political, argue that the leaders’ strong guidance is necessary for the EU to effectively function, especially during times of crisis. We propose instead that the leaders’ routine but active and assertive intervention in the everyday politics of co-decision complicates the ‘classic’ roles assigned to the EU’s legislative players. Indeed, to fully understand the legislative process, we may need to move from the well-established ‘institutional triangle’ to a new ‘institutional square’.

Edoardo Bressanelli is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

Christel Koop is Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London.

Francesca Minetto is a PhD Researcher at the Hertie School in Berlin, where she researches the European Union’s external relations and its institutions.

Christine Reh is Professor of European Politics at the Hertie School in Berlin.

This article is based on a CEPS Explainer, The European Council: Truly the law-maker-in-chief?, published in April 2025 on the website of the Centre of European Policy Studies.

Picture: European Council roundtable: European Union (European Council) [license], via European Council newsroom; portraits Edoardo Bressanelli, Christel Koop, Francesca Minetto, Christine Reh: private [all rights reserved].