A rightward shift in the European Parliament

Voting for the European Parliament closed on 9 June, after four days of polls across the twenty-seven member states, and when the counting was done the shape of the new legislature was recognizably shifted to the right. The centre-right European People’s Party remained the largest group, with about 188 of the parliament’s 720 seats, and the centre-left Socialists stayed second on roughly 136. The two traditional anchors of the chamber kept their place, but the parties to their right grew, and the centrist liberals of Renew Europe lost ground.

The headline came from France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won about 31 per cent of the vote, well ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition on about 15 per cent. The defeat was large enough that Macron, the following evening, dissolved the National Assembly and called a snap parliamentary election, a gamble that would dominate French politics for the rest of the summer. That move was a domestic consequence of the European vote rather than the vote itself, but it was the clearest sign of how badly the ruling centre had been shaken.

In Germany the centre-right CDU and CSU comfortably beat Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, who slumped to their worst result in modern history, and the Greens lost half their seats. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy did well enough that her European Conservatives and Reformists group overtook Renew Europe to become the fourth-largest group in the chamber, with about 78 seats. The new far-right Patriots for Europe group, which includes the National Rally, came third on about 84 seats. Neither nationalist group displaced the old mainstream, which together held well over half the seats, but the combined weight of the two right-wing groups was larger than it had been, and the arithmetic of passing legislation in the new parliament moved right with it.

The election also settled the question at the top of the Commission. Ursula von der Leyen, whose centre-right EPP had officially backed her for a second term, was the strongest candidate of the traditional parties, and her re-nomination was not in serious doubt even after the losses. The rightward drift did not unseat her; it narrowed the room in which she could manoeuvre, because the groups on which a majority depends — the EPP, the Socialists and the liberals — had all lost seats together, and she would need their co-operation more, not less, to form a working coalition. Members of the new parliament confirmed her in the job at their first plenary session in Strasbourg a few weeks later.

Turnout rose to its highest level in twenty years, to just over half of all eligible voters, which was read as a sign that European elections, long treated as a protest vote against national governments, were still capable of producing a national crisis. The centre-right remained in charge, but the wind on the right was stronger than it had been five years earlier, and the next Commission would have to govern with that wind at the back of its opponents. For the voters who turned out, the message was that the old middle could win a vote but no longer command a comfortable majority, and that the next five years in Brussels would be negotiated with a longer right shoulder than before.