Fabian Bohnenberger

With elections fast approaching, the European Parliament’s plenary last week was a flurry of votes to move legislation over the finish line. 

The high level of activity makes it an interesting time to take a closer look at the many proposals that remain to be adopted. To (partly) satisfy my curiosity, I did some calculations over the weekend. I am posting initial results below for your benefit.

The various EU data sources do not make it easy to keep track of the big picture – the EU’s “legislative pipeline” – if you will. The figures below try to bring some of the information together. A few gaps remain, notably on the Council side.

My calculation aims to include all legislative files that moved/are still moving through the so-called Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP). This is now the standard process to adopt new pieces of legislation. I only include files proposed in the current (9th) parliamentary term (2019-2024).

Still lots to do before the elections

Since 2019, the Commission has proposed around 550 pieces of legislation that fall under the OLP.

According to my calculation, 320 OLP files have now been adopted by Parliament and Council and a few (7) have been withdrawn by the Commission before they were adopted.

This leaves around 216 dossiers that are still moving through the legislative process. Parliament is rapidly running out of time to approve these laws. It has only two more plenaries in April to vote on pending files.

I am counting all files as completed that have received approval from Parliament and Council, including files that still need to be signed. I was surprised that the number of withdrawals is not slightly higher, which might mean I am still missing some dossiers.

Progress on pending files

But clearly we want to know more about the status of the unfinished files.

Let’s move through the process (clockwise in the figure above): The Commission is still proposing a small number of new files (5), which are only beginning their legislative journey. Expect a few more to appear.

In Parliament, 56 files have been referred to one or more committees to suggest a decision on the proposal. Another 19 are waiting for Parliament as a whole to make a decision on the next steps, usually based on a committe report.

Then there is a relatively rare sight: Because we are now so close to the elections, Parliament has adopted positions on 25 files before engaging in talks (“trilogues”) with the Council, its co-legislator. Parliament has partly done this to retain the progress it has made on the file internally – I explain this more here and here.

Moving on, around 33 trilogues still seem to be ongoing between the EU institutions. On 45 files, the responsible parliamentary committee has approved the trilogue agreement that was reached.

Finally, Parliament as a whole has approved the trilogue agreement on another 32 files. These files are now waiting for Council (the Member States) to also adopt them so they can be signed and published, after which they enter into force.

Next steps

Obviously a lot more could be said here, so I hope this quick-fire summary is still interesting and intelligible. Again, these are only rough counts with some clear limitations. I plan to dig further into the data in future posts.

Finally, it is important to clarify that it is entirely normal for the EU not to conclude every file before the elections. At the time of the last European elections in 2019, there were still around 170 unfinished files in total. The new (current) Parliament decided to continue work on some of them. The same will happen this time, explained further here.