Parlementarisation Through Administration? The General Secretariat of the European Parliament and Its Transformation (2009–2022)

The following chapter aims at filling a gap in scholarly literature in the analysis of the bureaucratic apparatus of the EU more generally speaking. Indeed, while there are quite important research projects focusing on the Commission, and to a lesser extent, on the General Secretariat of the Council, we lack studies on the General Secretariat of the European Parliament. The following account by Klaus Welle, Secretary General of the EP between 2009 and 2022 aims at enlightening the evolution of the GS under his mandate and at understanding to what extent administrative issues have been a vector to defend and potentially extend the EP role in the changing institutional framework of the European Union in the last decade. Elaborated from a semi-structured interview conducted with Hanna Corsini and Didier Georgakakis, the chapter is structured around two main sections. In the first one, Welle explains the general vision and plan behind the role played by the SG of Parliament to enable the EP’s reinforcement in the post-Lisbon Treaty period. In the second part, Welle discusses four cases which illustrate how the EP administration contributed to the empowerment of EU democracy.