Council of the European Union

The Council is a single body, but because of the different policy areas it meets in different configurations - the so-called Council formations, in which representatives of different departments meet. Each formation is composed of one representative per Member State. Under Article 16 of the EU Treaty, these representatives are empowered to act in a binding manner on behalf of their respective governments. For this reason, federally constituted Member States may also send ministers from the sub-national level to Council meetings if the central government has no competence in the matter in question. This is often the case for Belgium, for example, which sends ministers from the regions or communities to various Council formations.

Until June 2000, the Council met at times in twenty different configurations. After that, the number was initially reduced to sixteen, and in June 2002 further to nine, with an expansion to ten following the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009.

The General Affairs Council, in which the foreign or European ministers of the Member States are represented, plays a special role. It coordinates the activities of the other Council formations and takes decisions that cannot be assigned to any other Council formation. Foreign Ministers also meet in the Foreign Affairs Council, which is responsible for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. The Foreign Affairs Council is also the only one which has another member in addition to the representatives of the Member States, namely the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The High Representative chairs the Foreign Affairs Council, but does not have the right to vote on decisions.

Specifically, there are the following council formations:

As a rule, the Council formations meet at ministerial level twice per Council Presidency, i.e. every three months. The General Council, the Agriculture and Fisheries Council and the Economic and Financial Affairs Council meet more frequently, sometimes monthly. Council meetings are in principle open to the public when the Council is acting in a legislative capacity, but meetings at which no legislative decisions are taken are usually held in private.

Council meetings are prepared in advance at different levels. The main coordinating body is the Permanent Representatives Committee (Coreper), in which the permanent representatives of the Member States to the EU meet regularly. It is divided into two groupings: While most Council formations are prepared by Coreper I, where the Deputy Permanent Representatives meet, Coreper II, where the Permanent Representatives themselves meet, is responsible for Council formations with particularly sensitive policy areas, namely specifically the General Affairs Council, the Foreign Affairs Council, the ECOFIN Council and the Justice and Home Affairs Council. In addition, the Agriculture and Fisheries Council has its own preparatory committee, the Special Committee on Agriculture (SCA). Coreper and the SCA prepare the agenda for Council meetings and propose decisions on matters on which there is agreement between the Member States.

The actual preparation of the content of Council meetings is carried out by Council working groups, which are made up of officials from the Member States and each of which specialises in particular policy areas. For administrative and translation activities, the Council also has a General Secretariat with around 2,500 staff. Since 2009, the Frenchman Pierre de Boissieu has been Secretary-General, followed in 2011 by the German Uwe Corsepius, who was succeeded on 1 July 2015 by the Dane Jeppe Tranholm-Mikkelsen. His term of office is expected to end in 2025.

If ministers in the Council have not been able to reach agreement on certain issues, they can refer the matter to the European Council, where the heads of state or government of the EU member states meet. The European Council cannot itself intervene in EU legislation, but can only issue general guidelines. However, since within the national governments the members of the Council - i.e. the ministers - are subordinate to the members of the European Council - i.e. the heads of government - the compromises of the European Council also serve as guidelines for the decisions of the Council.

Chair

The Presidency of the Council of the European Union (also known as the Council Presidency) rotates every six months between the Member States; the meetings of the various Council formations, but also of all subordinate bodies such as Council working groups, are each chaired by the representative of the country concerned. An exception is the Foreign Affairs Council, which is chaired by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Since 2007, the Council has been chaired for a period of 18 months by a group of three member states in the form of a so-called trio presidency. One state continues to hold the presidency for six months at a time, but the three states present a joint programme and can also represent each other in chairing individual Council meetings.

On 1 January 2007, the Council of the European Union established the order for holding the Presidency of the Council until 2020. Previously, on 1 January 1995, the presidency states had been set until mid-2003 and, on 12 December 2005, those until mid-2018, but the accession of Romania and Bulgaria had made it necessary to add these two states to the presidency list. On 26 July 2016, the Council adopted a decision changing the order in which member states hold the presidency of the Council of the EU until 2030.

Following the United Kingdom's notification that it will relinquish the presidency of the Council in the second half of 2017, the Council decided to bring forward the presidencies by six months from 1 July 2017.

Voting procedure

Voting weighting until 2017

The double majority procedure was only definitively introduced from 2017 onwards; it was applied from 2014 onwards unless a Member State objected. Otherwise, the qualified majority procedure provided for in the Treaty of Nice applied on a transitional basis until then. For this purpose, all member states were each allocated a certain number of votes, ranging from 3 (Malta) to 29 (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy). According to this procedure, the following were necessary for the adoption of a legal act

• a simple majority of the Member States
• and a majority of 260 of the 352 votes
• In addition, at the request of a Member State, it had to be established whether the consenting Member States comprised at least 62% of the EU population.

The weighting of votes was roughly based on the population of the member states, although small states were given proportional preference (so-called degressive proportionality). However, the distribution of votes was not based on a clear key. Thus, the four most populous states all had the same number of votes, although Germany has significantly more inhabitants than the other three. Some of the states that only joined in 2004 also had a rather small number of votes in relation to their population; Spain and Poland, on the other hand, did quite well in the weighting of votes.

Today's double majority procedure since 2017

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union provides for different voting procedures depending on the policy area of the proposals on which the Council decides. On purely procedural matters, the Council usually acts by a simple majority of its members. On matters relating to the common foreign and security policy and other politically sensitive issues, such as taxation, the Council acts unanimously (see Legislation of the European Union).

However, a qualified majority is required for the ordinary legislative procedure, which applies in most EU policy areas. This has been defined since the Treaty of Lisbon via the principle of a double majority (Art. 238, TFEU), which requires that

• at least 55% of the Member States (currently 15), which at the same time
• represent at least 65 % of the EU population, whereby
• a blocking minority applies, by which member states representing more than 35% of the EU population plus one additional member state (that would currently be a total of 4) can exercise a veto.

In practice, this means that at least 23 (out of 27) member states must agree in order for a decision to be safely enforced. In fact, however, even in areas where theoretically only a qualified majority would be required, decisions are usually taken unanimously (by consensus).

In order to have comparable data on the number of inhabitants in the individual Member States, a Europe-wide population census is carried out every ten years according to uniform criteria, starting with the 2011 census.