Parliamentary Opposition and its Alternatives in a Transnational Regime: The European Union in Perspective

The contention that there is no such thing as parliamentary opposition at the European level belongs to the more established hypotheses concerning European governance, which have rarely and only more recently been challenged. This paper tries to demonstrate that it is possible to discern manifestations of parliamentary opposition, both at the national and the European level. That said, the overall status of parliamentary opposition within the European Union has remained rather modest. While there is a host of checks and balances and potential veto players, these institutions and actors represent 'alternatives' with different functional profiles rather than genuine 'functional equivalents' to parliamentary opposition. Institutional engineering continues to be the most promising road towards strengthening parliamentary opposition within the European multi-level system, though institutions alone will not be able to overcome the specific limits of representative democracy in the European Union.