The crises that have beset the EU in the past decade have provided plenty of opportunities for actors populating the EU’s political system to step up and assume political leadership. A product of the eurozone and sovereign debt crises, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance – or short, the Fiscal Compact – has been widely attributed to the political leadership of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. However, these accounts have unfairly overlooked the critical role EU institutions have played in ensuring a swift passage of the Fiscal Compact, say Sandrino Smeets and Derek Beach. In their article “Political and instrumental leadership in major EU reforms. The role and influence of the EU institutions in setting-up the Fiscal Compact” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Sandrino and Derek employ a process-tracing design to highlight the leadership of EU institutions, such as the Legal Service of the Council Secretariat. The findings of their analysis have wider implications for our understanding of how the European Council’s enhanced presence in EU decision-making has affected the role of EU institutions. Sandrino and Derek’s work suggests that “the informal and ‘isolated’ character of decision-making at the European Council level, paradoxically, created more instead of less dependence on EU institutions to translate the broad […] priorities [of Heads of State and Government] into actual reforms.”