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Amelia Hadfield*
After four days of democratic marathon European Parliament elections in 27 states, a picture emerges: a fragile centre that has barely managed to hold its own amid a rightward swing, but which, despite defeat, has great potential to shape the future of the European Union close to producing the earthquake that some predicted.
In a huge shock to France, President Emmanuel Macron, whose defeat at the hands of his National Rally (RN) party prompted him to call early national parliamentary elections, said France needed not only an “absolute majority” but also citizens who could “choose to write history rather than be carried away by it”.
French Crack
After some relief among centrists over the projected results in the Netherlands and Germany, France saw a rapid boost in support, with the RN (led by Marine Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella) reaching its highest national level in its history, destroying Macron’s own “Renewing Europe” coalition led by Valerie Heyer to come in second place in the EU election results for French government parties.
Across the EU, however, the picture is more nuanced. While the European Parliament is expected to gain more populist and far-right MEPs than ever before, the European People’s Party, which represents Europe’s mainstream conservative views, has expanded its overall size in this election, retaining its centrist position and playing the role of a “historically dominant force in the House of Representatives” and is expected to win around 25% of the seats in the parliament itself, with 184 MEPs.
The center-left grouping of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) also maintained its previous foothold. Having re-consolidated its power base, the EPP will retain clear responsibility for EU policies, including industrial, agricultural and climate policies, which are currently controversial among EU citizens. To do this, the EPP now needs to determine its preferred leader in the next phase of elections for EU institutions, including the European Commission.
Still a good night for the far right
While the European People’s Party and the Social Democrats held onto their centre, the far-right parties, which represent a diverse range of viewpoints and have been unable to coalesce into an electoral bloc because of intractable divisions over everything from Russia to European defence, performed very well.
In France, Le Pen/Bardella’s Republicans received a surprising third of the vote, while in Italy a quarter of voters backed Prime Minister Giorgia Meroni’s Italian Brotherhood. Adding up the remaining far-right votes across the EU suggests that the two key parliamentary groups – the hard right (ECR) and the extreme right (ID) – will control 131 seats. In addition, there are 34 from Germany’s AfD, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, and far-right independents in Poland and Bulgaria.
Some of them may have enough in common to unite nationalist and anti-immigration groups in the European Parliament, making them the big winners in 2024, very capable of shifting strategic EU policies to the right, including on immigration, trade, agriculture and climate change.
Data suggests that a far-right group will become the second largest party in the European Parliament after the European People’s Party. Coalition building is complex, especially among far-right groups, but numbers do matter. “However, its sheer size will put pressure on the EU’s right-wing policies,” the specialist website Politics Europe reported.
Even without a formal merger, the gathering of far-right voices is worrisome for the EPP and the Social Democratic group. In this regard, the successes of the far right have three major consequences. First: they confirm the expected rightward shift in Parliament itself; second, they risk further entrenching far-right preferences in a significant minority of EU member states; and third, within Parliament – and across the EU – they signal to international partners, including the United States, that the EU could suddenly change course in terms of policies and preferred partners.
Does green mean go (if)?
In the Netherlands, despite the strong prediction that Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) would win in the parliamentary elections, the Dutch Labour/Greens coalition managed to overtake them, winning eight seats to the Freedom Party’s six.
For Frans Timmermans, leader of the Labour/Greens coalition and a former EU commissioner, the result was a Pyrrhic victory. While the Netherlands continues to slide to the right, it may be losing pace. Timmermans said the result gave his group much-needed “strength to continue fighting for a social and green Europe.”
Green wins were harder to find elsewhere. Germany, for example, came in fourth, down 8.5% from 2019.
In France, the Greens received about 5% of the vote, the minimum threshold for election to the European Parliament. Without the support of the French and German Greens, despite small gains in the Netherlands and Denmark, the European Greens would fall from fourth to sixth place in Parliament, making them far less of a political leader than before, despite the extreme climate crisis Europe faces.
Is the European Parliament equal to the European Union?
For many, the results of the parliamentary elections symbolize the direction of the entire European Union: these results are a barometer of the political direction of some of Europe’s most important capitals.
In 2019, the European Parliament revived a “green wave” of MEPs, pushing for a series of green actions and a green deal on climate change, aimed at restructuring the EU from top to bottom in a climate-friendly way. Despite ideological differences between conservative and populist groups on the one hand and the far right on the other, the critical mass of openly Eurosceptic groups represents a clear desire to reshape key parts of the EU’s legislative apparatus, perhaps by decoupling the EU project itself from its post-war foundations.
For others, the parliament is not a microcosm of the EU. Not only will a range of right-wing parties strive to form a supergroup, with some coherence in the specific complexity of each EP party, but the EU is a leadership-based entity, with key policies directed by big bosses who lead the European Commission, the European Council, the head of foreign policy, and, to a lesser extent, the parliament itself. The composition of the parliament they will compete over has little to do with the strategic direction the EU will take after the elections, and instead indicates preferences that are more prominent at the national level than at the continental level.
Weeks of coalition negotiations
As weeks of coalition-building by centre parties and individual MEPs approach, at least five important issues remain before Parliament and the EU as a whole, starting with the executive election package for the EU institutions.
The most important is the two-stage process, where Ursula von der Leyen must first gain the support of the EU Council (heads of state), be re-elected as Commission President, and then determine whether she now has the 361 votes that the 720-seat Parliament needs her (in 2019 he won by just nine seats).
Thereafter, with the new team in place, the to-do list will include the war in Ukraine and European security, the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the continued cost-of-living restrictions, which currently include a deadly “cocktail of high levels of consumer prices, loss of purchasing power, rising social inequalities and stagnant economic growth”, as well as immigration and asylum issues and the restructuring of climate change obligations.
Given the results of elections later this year in the UK and the US, the EU inbox – and the European Parliament, which serves as the key overseer of the bloc’s budget and policies – remains subject to the phenomenon of “multiple crises”: a mixture of instability and uncertainty over long periods of emergencies with no real solution.
* Head of the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey
Professor Amelia Hadfield has received Erasmus+ funding from the European Commission.
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