This issue of Perspectives on Federalism presents a special symposium devoted to the elections of the European Parliament. The EU has frequently been described as a burden, a threat to national sovereignty or a technocratic subject provided with an indirect legitimacy, but this representation does not give justice to its important role in everyday life. Indeed, the EU is also an added value, thanks to EU law we have enjoyed new rights which we can now claim before national judges. In this sense, although it does not benefit from the kind of legitimacy that national democracies normally have, it for sure participates in the function historically played by constitutionalism.