OPINION - How has the rise of the far right affected the European Parliament?

By Thierry Tardy

- The author is an associate researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris and a visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges and Natolin).

ISTANBUL (AA) - Together with the European Union’s (EU) member states, the European Parliament (EP) acts as co-legislator of most EU laws. Following the June 6-9 elections, the new EP had its first plenary session from July 16 to 19, 2024 in Strasbourg, one of the two locations of the institution, together with Brussels. At this session were elected the presidents of both the EP and the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch. In both cases the incumbents, both from the majority European People’s Party (EPP), were re-elected: Malta’s Roberta Metsola for the Parliament and Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen for the Commission.

- The center of gravity moves right

Most interestingly, within the new Parliament the various groupings reflect the outcome of the elections, with a significant move of the chamber to the far right of the European political landscape. Although they lose a few seats, the first two groups are nonetheless unchanged, with the EPP (188 seats out of 720) and the Social Democrats (136 seats) still being largely in the lead, and therefore able to get the great majority of key European positions. But the center-right group Renew (77 seats), which was the third group in the previous Parliament composition, has now been overtaken by two extreme-right groups: the newly created Patriots for Europe (84 seats), composed inter alia of France’s Rassemblement national and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz (Hungary); and the already existing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR, 78 seats), with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). A third far-right group has also been formed: Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) (25 seats), mainly composed of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

- No far-right unity

Altogether those three far-right groups have the same number of seats as the majority party EPP, and could therefore potentially play a significant political role. Yet longstanding divergences among them, inter alia about the stance towards Russia, have prevented them from constituting larger groups.

Political dynamics within the Parliament have also led to systematic coalitions against the far right, be it on the election of key positions within the institution or on law adoption votes. This is called the “sanitary cordon” which is likely to be applied against the far right in the coming legislature. As a matter of fact both the Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations have been denied a position of vice-president of the Parliament as a result of the sanitary cordon, and only Meloni’s ECR got a vice-presidency seat.

The opposition between the center-right and left parties on the one hand, and the far-right on the other hand, have also found an illustration in the vote of one of the very first resolutions on Ukraine, on July 17. The text, which denounced Orban’s visit to Moscow while Hungary is holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and reasserted the EU’s support to Ukraine, was largely voted against (137 votes out of 720) by the far-right groups.

- A pro-Russia extreme right

But here comes a key divergence between those groups. While the ECR, dominated by Fratelli d’Italia and Poland’s PiS, is largely supportive of the EU’s policy towards Ukraine, the Patriots for Europe, with France’s far-right party leader Jordan Bardella and Orban, are more or less openly pro-Russian and therefore at odds with the EU’s Ukraine policy. This is partly what explains why the Rassemblement national failed to create a large group within the Parliament together with Meloni.

Overall, these very first votes at the EP, together with the making up of political groups, have already shed light on how the new European chamber will operate. If the extreme right has been reinforced, anti-European forces are still too weak and disunited to significantly impact the EP’s legislative role. The threat, however, may come from the member states themselves, where extreme right movements are increasingly making it to governments, including in large European countries

Source: European Parliament https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/index.html

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu