The Impact of the Financial Crisis on the Constitutions of Eurozone Member States Under Rescue Programs – Greece as a Laboratory of Constitutional Theory

The financial crisis in the Eurozone and the entry of some Member States to rescue programs have brought about major changes in the institutional structure of the EU economic governance. They have also been the subject of a quite interesting case law in the CJEU and the ECtHR. However, this experience primarily affected the national legal order and national Constitutions. Experiencing three consecutive programs (2008-2018), Greece is the laboratory in which the resilience of the national Constitution and the European constitutional theory were tested. A number of rather serious issues were raised concerning the interpretation of the Constitution, the relationship between national Constitution, EU legal order and international law and the limits of the judicial review of austerity legislation. Moreover, questions arose concerning the regulatory content of the Constitution itself, either through informal constitutional changes or through the formal amendment process. The main finding of the study is that the national Constitution demonstrated resilience and adaptability. During the crisis, heated public debate arose concerning the internal and external sovereignty of a Member State in crisis, without violating the constitutional framework. The financial crisis did not function as a state of emergency in the legal sense of the term but as a real situation that affected the interpretation of the Constitution mainly through the concept of general interest and the principle of proportionality. The crisis has highlighted the importance of fiscal awareness as a parameter in the interpretation of the Constitution