La sussidiarietà e l’early warning system tra diritto e politica. Il caso della c.d «Direttiva Tabacco

The 2009 Lisbon Treaty introduced the Early Warning Mechanism into the EU decisionmaking process, giving to theNational Parliaments the task of monitoring the compliance of the EU legislative proposals with the principle of subsidiarity. The paper aims at analyzing the nature of this scrutiny, in particular if it is interpreted merely technically or as a political one. Starting from the interesting case-study of the Tobacco Directive (2014), which has triggered a great number of reasoned opinions of different national Parliaments, but not enough to obtain the extract of a yellow card. The paper seeks to analyze the reading of the National Parliaments, especially after the development of a political dialogue. Finally it looks at the case law of the tobacco legislation of the Court of Justice and at the use of the subsidiarity principle, in the light of the judgments of the 2014 Directive (4 may 2016).