The European Commission is in the final stages of drafting a legislative proposal, to be published by the end of April, on reforming the economic governance of the European Union. The proposal will follow on from a plan, published in November (European Commission, 2022), that set out the main lines of the Commission’s thinking and gave EU countries a chance to respond. The stakes for the new proposal are very high. If the Commission ignores the criticisms of EU countries, the reform will not pass before the 2024 European elections. This would leave the fiscal governance of the EU in an extended state of limbo. But if the Commission accommodates EU countries too much, the reform will lose the intellectual strengths of the original plan and may morph into something resembling the present system – a Frankenstein’s monster of overlapping rules and procedures. […]