The Paradoxical European Election Results

The centre held. Yet within the centre of the EU, the centre did not completely hold.

Votes are still being counted in some EU member states following last weekend’s transnational European Elections, in which voters from the 27 EU member states went to the polls to directly elect representatives to the European Parliament for the next term. Already, we have a pretty good picture of what the European parliamentary landscape will look like for the next five years.

Turnout

First of all, it is worth noting that this year’s election suggests that Europeans are overall more engaged with European-level politics than in many years. Turnout was at its highest this century, at 51%. The last time turnout exceeded this figure was in 1994 when just under 57% of European voters went to the polls in what was then an EU of just 12 member states.

Election Results

There was a lot at stake in this election . At first glance, the overall results coming through seem to indicate that while there was a shift to the political right, the status quo will pretty much continue in the European Parliament over the next term. The pro-European parliamentary groupings that oscillate around the political centre have the numbers to form a governing coalition not too dissimilar to what was in place over the last five years.

A new coalition of the political centre is a strong possibility in an enlarged parliament of 720 members. The center-right European Peoples Party (EPP), the centre-left Socialist & Democrats (S&D), and the liberal Renew Europe (RE) group would easily secure a comfortable majority if it can be successfully negotiated. The Greens could also play a part. If that happens, the governing majority should be expected to be slightly more right-wing than the last term given that the EPP was the only party among them to gain seats since the last election in 2019 .

The numbers are, however, just not there in this election for alternative non-centric formations such as exclusively right-wing or left-wing majorities. This means that the traditional politics of compromise rather than division is likely to remain in the European Parliament.

However, that is only part of the story because the European Parliament, although powerful, does not enjoy exclusive legislative power. In the EU, the parliament shares legislative power with the member states. This means who governs in each of the 27 member states also matters for what direction EU legislation will take in the next five years. It is the EU Commission that normally proposes legislation and the parliament and the member-states that approve it. It is the member states that get to nominate the next EU Commission and the EU Commission President, which the parliament must then decide to approve.

Within the EU centre

I wrote recently about the importance of France and Germany in driving the EU forward and why that bilateral relationship matters. It is hard to get much done in the EU without the backing of most or all of the 27 member states, but that is particularly the case of the two largest member states. Italy is another founding EU member state that matters given its status as the third largest member-state by economic and population size.

Paradoxically, while the status quo of centrist politics seems to have won out overall at the EU level in these elections, that was not completely the case in these three large member states, which are very much at the centre of power in the European Union. There was another trend at play within these core member-states where the political centre did not completely hold in the way it once did.

Within these three largest member-states, there were significant gains for parties that are largely considered far-right on the political spectrum. Such parties tend to be nationalist and populist in nature and would like to reduce EU authority, dramatically reduce immigration, and scale back the EU’s climate agenda. Continue to read or listen to this article on Kevin Unscrambles

This article appeared on Kevin Unscrambles on the 13/06/2024

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