The semi-permanent presidency of the European Council, introduced by virtue of the Lisbon Treaty, has restructured the organizational space of the EU presidency, becoming the new leadership centre in the EU institutional engineering. Consequently the institutional balance in the whole system has been changed, however without a clear jurisdictional delimitation of the competences between the components of this multi-centre political system. In the imprecisely defined conceptual framework of the new space of the EU presidency, there exists a question of the possibility of various levels multiplying and overlapping with each other, giving rise to a potential conflict of power in this area.

The aim of this article is to provide the assessment of the scope of implications of the introduced changes on the basis of analysis of the structural relations between the President of the European Council and his institutional partners in the EU hybrid presidency system, i.e. the President of the European Commission, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the rotating country presidency. This scientific problem seems to be of both theoretical and practical relevance with respect to the just initiated term of office of new President of the European Council – Donald Tusk.