became clear that he could lose , he instead announced in Parliament , just ahead of the vote , that he was withdrawing his team and would come back with a new proposal . He did so the following month with a new Italian nominee ( Foreign Minister Franco Frattini ), a new Latvian nominee , and a reshuffling of the Hungarian nominee to a new portfolio , thereby meeting Parliament ’ s main concerns . Strikingly , every prospective Commission since then ( in 2009 , 2014 and 2019 ) has seen at least one candidate Commissioner fall in this way .
Parliament did not just act unilaterally . It negotiated interinstitutional agreements ( IIAs ) bilaterally with the Commission ( the most important of which is the Framework Agreement ) and trilaterally with the Council and the Commission ( the most important of which is the IIA on Better Law-Making ). These IIAs specify a number of obligations , for reporting to Parliament and giving it access to documents ( including confidential ones ). They also require legislative programming to be negotiated and agreed by the three institutions , and set out requirements for responding within a deadline to Parliament ’ s legislative initiatives , and for the President-designate of the Commission to present political guidelines for their term of office before they are elected by Parliament .
The elected parliament also made use of its ( few ) old powers that the previous unelected parliament had never used . It has rejected the annual budget outright on four occasions , temporarily freezing EU spending and putting extra pressure on the Council in a second budget procedure . It has deployed the power to dismiss the Commission . Parliament had enjoyed this power from the beginning but it seemed rather theoretical until early 1999 when it was spectacularly illustrated with the resignation of the Santer Commission , after it became clear that there was the necessary majority in Parliament for a vote of no confidence .
42