The Reform of the Council Presidency: Paving the Way for a New Synergy with the European Commission?

The reform of the presidential system exerts an influence over the dialectic of power between the Council Presidency and the Commission. Since the late 1990s, several key innovations have been introduced to the rotating system in order to improve the continuity of the Council’s work. These functional changes such as the new stable, team and super partes presidencies involve a break from the traditional “national profile” of the Presidency. The aim of this article is to analyse this process of institutional conversion and to explore how it seems to affect the relationship with the Commission. The hypothesis rests on the idea that the reform of the presidential system, and in particular the increasing tendency towards communitarisation that it sets in motion, is an intervening variable for the development of co-operative rather than conflictive inter-institutional dynamics.