Piero Cipollone, member of the executive board of the European Central Bank.
Denis LOMME © European Union 2026 – Source : EP
In October 2025, at a conference held at the European Parliament, I put one question to Piero Cipollone—the ECB executive board member personally responsible for the digital euro project. The question was straightforward: on what legal basis does the ECB consider itself authorised to create a new form of money? His answer was public and recorded. He said he believed it rested on Article 133 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Then he added that he might be wrong and pointed to the ECB’s own legal services as the source of that conclusion.
The ECB did publish a formal opinion on the regulation—Opinion CON/2023/31, October 2023. But that opinion was written by the ECB itself: the institution that designed the project, promotes it, and was seeking parliamentary authorisation for it. An institution reviewing its own proposal is not independent scrutiny. It is the project’s sponsor endorsing its own work. No external body had ever been asked.
Eight months later, on June 23, 2026, the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee voted 43 to 14 to open trilogue negotiations on the digital euro regulation. Some observers, when confronted with the legal basis question, reply that it is the Commission’s prerogative to interpret the Treaties when proposing legislation. This is true in a narrow sense. It is not true in the sense that matters: the final arbiter of Treaty interpretation is the Court of Justice of the European Union, not the Commission. The CJEU has annulled EU legislation on grounds of incorrect legal basis on multiple occasions—C-300/89, C-178/03, C-355/10. The Commission being confident of its own legal interpretation is precisely the problem, not the solution.
Article 133 TFEU empowers Parliament to lay down measures for the use of the existing euro. Not to create a third form of central bank money alongside banknotes and reserves. The ECB’s own founding report, published in 2020, identified Articles 127(2) and 128 as the more appropriate bases for an instrument with legal tender status accessible to citizens—the precise design now heading toward plenary. The Commission chose Article 133 alone, departed from the ECB’s own legal mapping, and offered no explanation for doing so. The Commission’s proposal itself acknowledges that “no existing text covers the digital euro.” If Article 133 already sufficed, no new regulation would have been necessary. The text defeats its own legal argument.
Two further grounds for annulment before the CJEU exist independently of the first. The regulation mandates structural interoperability with the European Digital Identity Wallet, an instrument built on a different Treaty article—Article 114. Under established case law, where a regulation simultaneously pursues components rooted in different Treaty competences without one being merely incidental, it must be founded on both bases. It is not. And the Commission is granted delegated powers to modify the regulation’s core parameters—privacy thresholds, holding limits, remuneration conditions—without returning to Parliament. Even where these powers are time-limited, standard Treaty mechanics allow silence to count as renewal at expiry. A limit Parliament does not have to actively renew is not really a limit. It is a preference, valid until the next Commission decision.
Parliament’s own legal service has never been asked to examine any of these questions. Under Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, any political group can submit a formal written request today. The Committee on Legal Affairs can also examine the legal basis of a proposal at any stage, on its own initiative, under Rule 41—and if it disputes the basis, Parliament must vote on that question before voting on the substance. As of today, no such referral has been made.
The 14 votes against on June 23 came from Patriots for Europe and European Conservatives and Reformists. Their counter-amendments, including a formal challenge to the legal basis, were rejected and entered the official minutes of the session. That record now exists. It will matter later, when the regulation’s legal foundations are examined by someone with the authority to rule on them.
What was adopted on 23 June merits careful reading. The inter-group compromise that formed the basis of the vote states that offline payments will be limited to local transactions “at least initially.” Given a drafting method that treats today’s restrictions as starting points rather than commitments, the phrase deserves attention. In legislative drafting, “initially” does not mean “permanently.” It means “for now.” A restriction that can be lifted by delegated act, in a regulation that grants the Commission power to revise core parameters without a parliamentary vote, is not a guarantee. It is the project’s current position, not its final one.
The day before the ECON committee voted in Brussels, the United States Senate voted 85 to 5 on a bipartisan housing bill that included a four-year prohibition on a federal central bank digital currency. The sponsors—Republican and Democratic alike—stated publicly that the privacy and oversight risks of a government-controlled digital currency outweighed its potential benefits. Europe moved in the opposite direction the very next day, on a legal basis no independent authority has ever examined.
There is something else that has not been said plainly enough. Article 25(1) of the regulation explicitly provides for interoperability between the digital euro and the European Digital Identity Wallet—the same wallet that the European Commission now plans to use as the verification instrument for Digital Services Act compliance. The DSA, in turn, serves as the enforcement arm of the European Democracy Shield, launched in November 2025: a framework that the Heritage Foundation’s Paul McCarthy has described as a mechanism for centralising narrative control in Brussels and treating political dissent as a regulatory risk. This is not a fringe view. It is a published analysis by a credentialed researcher citing the Commission’s own documentation.
The connection between these systems—the digital euro, the EUDI Wallet, and the DSA—is not a theory. Each link is in a published legislative text. The wallet that authenticates your digital euro payments is the same wallet the DSA will use to verify who may access online services. Nothing in the current text would prevent a content moderation decision under the DSA from carrying financial consequences for a user whose digital euro account is connected to the same wallet—without any additional judicial step. No one in Parliament has been asked to examine whether a firewall is needed or whether its absence is compatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
As of this writing, one week after the vote, the text adopted by ECON on 23 June has still not been published in Parliament’s own official register. The text exists. It has circulated among MEPs and their advisers since the vote. It has not been made public.
The plenary vote, expected the week of July 6, will not be a debate on the substance of the text. Under Parliament’s own procedure for first-reading negotiating mandates, the committee’s report becomes the mandate unless enough MEPs formally request a vote—and if a vote is held, it is a single yes-or-no decision on the mandate as adopted in committee on June 23. There is no mechanism, at this stage, to amend the text itself. Every MEP who votes yes will be voting for a mandate that rests on an unexamined legal basis, contains restrictions framed as merely ‘initial,’ and grants the Commission delegated powers whose renewal does not require an active parliamentary vote. They will be doing so without the text having been formally published. Whatever questions remain unanswered when the vote is called will remain unanswered when the trilogue begins.
Article 263 TFEU gives any Member State two months from the date of Official Journal publication to bring an annulment action before the CJEU on grounds of incompetence. That clock starts after trilogue concludes—likely in 2027. The factual record being assembled now will still be there when it does.
Parliament’s task is not only to vote. It is to legislate with legal certainty. On 6-9 July, MEPs will face a single choice: ratify a mandate built on a legal basis its own architect could not confirm, or ask, before it is too late, the question that was never put to anyone but him.
