The European Council regularly intervenes in everyday law-making by expressing legislative priorities in summit conclusions. Edoardo Bressanelli, Christel Kopp and Christine Reh theorise and analyse the impact of these priorities on the duration of the EU’s co-decision (or ordinary legislative) procedure. Theoretically, they argue that the European Council increases speed through leadership. Leadership translates, via political authority, into limited hierarchical relations between the national heads of state or government on the one hand and the co-legislators on the other. Drawing on scholarship on institutionalisation, crisis politics, and multi-level negotiation, they hypothesise that the European Council’s priorities can speed up co-legislation. ‘Speeding up’ should happen, in particular, from late 2009 onwards, when the European Council became a formal EU institution and in crisis-related laws, when leaders leverage their EU-level authority. They assess their argument by using a mixed-methods design. Their new dataset combines concluded legislation and pending proposals between 1999 and 2024 with the European Council’s legislative priorities. Event history analysis is bolstered with qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. They find that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Against their expectation, the European Council’s priorities do not accelerate legislation under crisis, but crisis-related laws themselves are concluded faster. Their paper provides new insights into how the European Council impacts everyday law-making and on the widely debated topic of leadership in the EU and in other multi-level systems.