This paper examines the evolving role of the Council in the implementation of EU law, particularly regarding crisis-related spending instruments. The Treaties reserve the implementation of EU law for the Commission and Member States and only exceptionally for the Council. However, instruments adopted to tackle recent crises—the COVID-19 pandemic, rule of law crisis, and the war in Ukraine—have conferred to the Council extensive implementing powers, both widening and deepening their reach. The same instruments have foreseen an unusual role for the European Council in the relation to the adoption of implementing decisions by the Council (so called “emergency brakes”).

After having examined the legal framework for both the conferral implementing powers to the Council and their exercise in light of the case law of Court of Justice, the paper will turn to the way these greater implementing powers have been exercised and show that in practice the Council has acted with considerable restraint and limited its role to one of political oversight rather than active shaping of implementing decisions.

Despite concerns that this evolution could undermine the institutional balance, findings suggest that the new expanded role for the Council has instead reinforced the Commission, by providing political backing to its actions, particularly when decisions have major financial or political implications for Member States. At the same time, the conferral of greater implementing powers to the Council, as well as the “emergency brakes”, have concurred to create the political conditions for the adoption of crisis instruments at the Union level by providing reassurances to the Member States as to the way decisions involving key national interests would be taken. In so doing, the expanded role of the Council has been crucial in enhancing integration and solidarity in times of crisis and preventing a return to national or intergovernmental crisis responses, instead fostering EU-wide solutions.