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not led to any substantial civil society input into policymaking processes,
and has consequently failed to bridge the gap between EU institutions and
civil society, which is also reflected in the general lack of interest in this
instrument (Schweiger 2017, 205).
a. The politicisation dilemma
Another innovation in the Lisbon Treaty aimed at enhancing the Unions input
legitimacy was the so-called Spitzenkandidat process, which was designed to
provide European-level political competition with identifiable faces through
the nomination by European-level political parties (Europarties) of lead
candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) for the post of the next President of the
European Commission in the run up to European Parliament elections. This
new instrument worked in 2014, but failed in 2019, leading to doubts as to
whether it will ever be possible to restore it again.
The Spitzenkandidat initiative brings us to a specific segment of ideas for
strengthening the EU’s input legitimacy, notably the politicisation of European
integration and its polity. Edgar Grande and Swen Hutter define this as the
multidimensional phenomenon of increasingly salient and polarised public
debate among an expanding range of actors over EU-related matters across
European and national political arenas (Grande and Hutter 2016, 8-10). EU
scholars usually see this as a reverse trend to integration by stealth, when
national political elites perform policymaking in Brussels in a protected bubble
remote from public deliberation and scrutiny (e.g. Coman et al. 2020, 16) ¬
while legitimacy for any political system can only be constructed through
discussion, deliberation, and contestation (Schmidt 2020, 29).
The idea of making the EU more political is not new, of course. It was in
this spirit that the Maastricht Treaty (1992/93) acknowledged the importance
of “political parties at European level” in the early 1990s, and the Amsterdam
Treaty (1997/99) made it possible to finance them from the Union’s budget.
As a result of this, Europarties have gradually been institutionalised since
2004, followed by the setting up of European-level political foundations, or
Eurofoundations, as from 2007.
In parallel, new dynamics in the multilevel politicisation of the Union
also emerged. At the ‘bottom, EU-related issues have become increasingly
salient in national politics; on the bottom-up side, EU actors have become
increasingly aware of, and concerned about, public perceptions of their
decisions and actions; while at the top level, an intensifying politicisation of
interactions between EU institutions can be observed, leading also to a more
politicised communication by them (e.g. Schmidt 2020, 69-83).
One intention behind the idea of politicising European integration is the
aim of creating a real European demos, sharing a European identity shaped in
a common European public space with the active participation of European