EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 5, Exercise 3
Why 2020 Was Different
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QUESTION:
Using the real Simmenthal principle and the real 2020 German
PSPP/Weiss ruling, explain the structural difference between a
national court setting aside a conflicting national law (as
Simmenthal requires) and a national court setting aside a CJEU
ruling itself (as the German court did in 2020).

SOLUTION:

Under Simmenthal, a national court sets aside a piece of NATIONAL
law — a statute passed by its own country's legislature — in favor
of EU law. This is, in a real sense, the national legal order
policing itself: a national court is subordinating its own country's
domestic law to EU law, which is exactly the hierarchy the supremacy
doctrine describes and which national courts had, by and large,
accepted as legitimate for decades.

The 2020 German Federal Constitutional Court ruling did something
structurally different. It didn't set aside a German statute — it
set aside a ruling of the CJEU ITSELF (the 2018 Weiss judgment, which
had upheld the ECB's PSPP bond-buying program as within its mandate).
Germany's own top court declared that this CJEU decision was "ultra
vires" and therefore simply didn't bind Germany.

The structural difference is which authority is being subordinated
to which. Simmenthal has a national court subordinate national law
to EU law — reinforcing the EU's own legal hierarchy. The 2020 German
ruling has a national court subordinate a CJEU ruling to the national
court's own judgment about what the EU's real legal competence
actually is — directly challenging who gets the final say over the
EU's own legal order, rather than accepting the CJEU's own supremacy
as settled.

This is why the 2020 ruling was unprecedented: it wasn't a national
court failing to follow supremacy doctrine correctly (which Simmenthal
already anticipates and corrects for) — it was a national top court
asserting that the CJEU itself had exceeded ITS OWN proper role, a
genuinely different and more fundamental kind of challenge.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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The strongest answers identify precisely which body is being
subordinated to which in each case — Simmenthal: national law → EU
law; the 2020 ruling: a CJEU ruling → a national court's own judgment
— rather than describing both simply as "a national court disagreeing
with EU law." This distinction is exactly what makes the 2020 case a
genuine complication of the supremacy doctrine rather than just
another ordinary instance of it.