Will Legislative Trialogues Survive their Institutionalisation?

The legislative trialogues appeared in the early 2000’s as an informal initiative of representatives of the three institutions involved in EU law-making. It was designed to limit the interinstitutional conflicts and to favor the smooth adoption of texts. Within each institution, key-actors considered that the ‘pre-cooking’ of legislative texts was useful, and even necessary to cope with the impact of the 2004 enlargement decision making. This experience has been progressively codified, within the internal rules of each institution and through interinstitutional agreements. Today, trialogues are part of the EU routine: they are organized for nearly all legislative proposals, and allow the adoption of 90% of the texts in first reading, thanks to the agreements negotiated by the delegates of the EP, the Council and the Commission. A vast literature has analyzed many aspects of that phenomena: its history, its operation, its formalization, its impact on the policy-making, its consequences in terms of influence for the different institutions and within the different them. The place of trialogues within the EU political system remains however uncertain. Is it just a mechanism aiming at overcoming a situation or crisis or is it a durable modality of the EU policy-making? What are the intentions and strategies of the main institutional actors in this respect? Also, one can wonder if the increased formalization of trialogues is not progressively depriving them from their efficiency. Born as a very informal meeting of a dozen of actors, capable to negotiate quite freely, they now involve at least 50 persons, and sometimes up to 100, who need to respect clear mandates from their respective institution. The mechanism invented by institutions to improve the EU governance may thus progressively cease to be efficient as it is institutionalized.