Towards a strengthened coordination between the EU and national budgets. A complementary role and a joint control for parliaments?

The European Parliament (EP) and national parliament (NPs) occupy two opposite but complementary positions as budgetary authorities in the EU and, indeed, democratic legitimacy of EU and national budgetary procedures can hardly be conceived without taking into account NPs and the EP together. Framed within the discourse on throughput legitimacy, the article analyses if and to what extent the EP and NPs are involved in the decisions on EU revenues and expenditures as well as in the European Semester and what initiatives has the EP supported to enhance its participation and that of NPs in those domains. Given the unsatisfactory status quo, the article put forward the proposal of a joint parliamentary control carried out by an interparliamentary committee on EU and national budgets to redress the problem of a lack of coordinated democratic scrutiny over them, in addition to the control carried out by the EP and NPs individually.