EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 10 (Capstone), Exercise 3
Domestic Politics Doesn't Pause EU Business
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QUESTION:
Using the real overlap between the DMA's own implementation timeline
and Germany's traffic-light coalition's full lifespan (December 2021
to November 2024), explain why a member state's EU obligations
continue regardless of its own domestic political turbulence.

SOLUTION:

Germany's real three-party "traffic light" coalition governed from
its formal signing on 7 December 2021 until its collapse on 7
November 2024. Within that same real window, the DMA moved from
formal adoption (September 2022) through entry into force, applicable
status, gatekeeper designation (September 2023), and into its early
enforcement phase — continuing on, without pause, right through and
past the coalition's own collapse, all the way to the first DMA fines
in April 2025 under whatever German government held office by then.

The reason EU obligations continue regardless of domestic political
turbulence is structural: once a Regulation like the DMA is formally
adopted and in force, it binds every member state directly — as
Chapter 5 explains, a Regulation applies immediately and identically
across the Union with no separate national implementing law required,
and as Chapter 2 covers, the Commission's own enforcement powers
(designating gatekeepers, imposing fines) operate at the EU level,
independent of what is happening inside any single member state's own
government at a given moment.

In other words, a domestic government's collapse changes who
represents that country in future EU negotiations and who is
responsible for domestic implementation tasks going forward, but it
does not pause, suspend, or unwind EU law that has already been
adopted and is already in force. The EU's own legal order runs on its
own timeline, continuous and independent of any single member state's
own internal political cycle.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers explain the STRUCTURAL reason (a Regulation's
own direct, EU-level applicability and enforcement, independent of
any one national government) rather than simply observing that the
two timelines happened to overlap without explaining why that overlap
doesn't disrupt anything.