Weiss en de toekomst van de Europese democratie

This article analyzes the Weiss ruling in a broader constitutional perspective. In section 2, I first outline how the Weiss ruling relates to Karlsruhe's case law on the EU. In section 3, I then zoom in on the legal issue in the Weiss case and compare the German court's ruling with that of the ECJ. In section 4, I discuss whether the German judges were right to raise a democratic deficit in the ECB's actions and whether the ruling helps to reduce that deficit. My answer in short is: yes and no. Karlsruhe points to a democratic deficit, but the ruling in Weiss cannot fix that structural problem. In section 5, I turn to the further implications of the ruling for the EU. There I show how fundamental questions about the future of the Union have increasingly fallen into the hands of the Karlsruhe judges. In Section 6, I explain why the Karlsruhe case law is ultimately itself problematic from a democratic point of view, even though the German Constitutional Court's jurisprudence relies precisely on the constitutional principle of democracy. Section 7 concludes with a conclusion.