City Research Online

Abstract

The European Union's recently proposed Critical Medicines Act (CMA) was published without recourse to standard democratic policy‐making procedures. Framed by the European Commission as an urgent response to a pressing security threat, the CMA was not subject to an impact assessment, and the stakeholder consultation designed to inform its development was both short and last‐minute. In this commentary, we examine the implications of the CMA case for the democratic legitimacy of EU policy‐making. We argue that, since medicine shortages have been on the EU agenda for nearly a decade and the CMA extends beyond emergency provisions to address long‐term industrial policy, it does not constitute an urgent or exceptional policy issue in the usual sense. Situating the CMA within wider patterns of EU health securitisation, we highlight the risks posed by circumventing procedural safeguards, concluding that this shift may exacerbate perceptions of a democratic deficit within EU governance.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Critical Medicines Act; democratic legitimacy; European Union; impact assessment; securitisation
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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