Dear readers,
Welcome to EU Elections Decoded, your essential guide for staying up to date and receiving exclusive insights about the upcoming EU elections. This is Max Griera, writing from Brussels. Subscribe here.
In today’s edition
- What comes after the EU election results? Group reshuffles, job allocations, and much political bargaining among the Parliament’s groups.
- Bits of the week: Follow the elections live with Euractiv; Hungary reacts to Belgium’s comments on rule of law; first turnout rates out; disinformation campaigns continue.
On Monday (10 June), the day after the EU elections, the Parliament’s political groups will rush to recompose themselves and divide money and top jobs. The tricky part? They are supposed to follow the almighty d’Hondt law, which is set to award the far-right a chunk of the Parliament’s influence pie.
The first 72hours
On Tuesday (11 June), while all freshly elected MEPs start coming to Brussels, the current chairs of all political groups will meet with Parliament President Roberta Metsola to take stock of the election results and discuss who should be the next Commission and Parliament presidents.
Leading MEPs will also start a frenzy of calls and meetings to discuss the new political arrangements.
For example, Renew will meet on 11 or 12 June with all their new MEPs to discuss whether to kick out the Dutch VVD party from their ranks, for allying with the far-right in their national government.
The centre-right EPP group is also expected to meet on 12 June to give a round of victory applause to their lead candidate Ursula von der Leyen – running for a second term at the helm of the Commission – and start discussing the group’s next steps.
Rushing to allocate money andjobs
The timeline for the groups’ reshuffling – where we might see new alliances on the extreme right and left of the hemicycle – is tight. Not only will we see new group compositions with members shifting groups, but each group presidency is also up for grabs.
The EPP will discuss new memberships on 18 June and vote on their president – likely the incumbent German Manfred Weber – on 19 June. That same day, the Greens are also expected to reelect their two co-chairs.
The Socialists will assemble to elect their president – again, probably the incumbent Iratxe García, as the Spanish delegation is to stay the largest – on 25 June, the same day that The Left’s group constitutes.
The last ones will be liberal Renew Europe and hard-right ECR, on the 26 of June, followed by far-right ID on the 4 of July. Do expect big changes in these last two, as Europe’s radical right figures call for a grand reshuffle to unite forces.
The political groups have a special interest in completing their reshuffling as soon as possible: money and horse-trading over leading posts.
Firstly, in election years, a part of each group’s budget expires on 30 June. Afterwards, the Parliament’s leadership needs to approve the new appropriations based on the new group’s composition. In short: the more MEPs, the more money.
Secondly, groups need to recompose as soon as possible to be able to start dividing the 100+ internal jobs allocated according to the election results, such as vice-presidencies and committee chairmanships – which ultimately define the level of influence each group wields within the Parliament.
D’Hondt and national delegations’ interests
To allocate the top jobs, the Parliament is meant to follow the d’Hondt law, a complex mathematical formula for allocating seats – or in this case jobs – to reflect the election results.
Though on paper the groups have until the start of the first plenary session on 16 July to communicate their composition to the Parliament president, they have set among themselves an internal deadline of 4July to have time to split the Parliament’s vice-presidencies, quaestors, committee chairmanships and vice-chairmanships – following the d’Hondt method.
This way, they will be able to start trading earlier their influence with other political groups, according to the interests of the leading national delegations in each group.
National delegations, starting from the biggest, usually get the preference in picking first which jobs they want to aim for.
For example, the Spanish Socialists, in 2019 the leading delegation within S&D and overall among the Parliament’s top five, pressured for their right to nominate the chair for the European and Latin-American parliamentary assembly.
While the d’Hondt method objectively assigns positions, there is much space for back-room deals and back-stabbing – nothing is set in stone until it is voted during the first plenary session and later on, in the second half of July, during the first committee sessions,
What about the far-right’s influence?
According to the tradition of cordon sanitaire, the pro-EU parties do not negotiate with the far-right. At least, this has been the case so far.
If applying the d’Hondt method to Europe Elects’ projectionsfor Euractiv, however, far-right ID is awarded one Parliament vice-presidency, and two committee chairmanships – in line with the current number of committees.
But that does not automatically mean that the far-right will score top jobs.
In 2019, for example, ID put forward one nominee for Parliament vice-presidency, Lega’s Mara Bizzoto, as they were technically entitled to the post. However, the name got voted down because of the cordon sanitaire.
As ID is projected to become a powerful player in the next term, it remains to be seen whether they will continue to be bypassed, or whether they will be allowed to grab a piece of the pie and join the horse-trading game.
In the last term, hard-right ECR was allowed to hold one vice-presidency and one committee chair, but under strict conditions.
For example, while it would have been usual protocol for one of the biggest delegations of the ECR to score a committee chairmanship, pressure from the EPP made the hard-right group ultimately nominate a more ‘acceptable’ profile for the chairmanship of the budget committee, a lawmaker coming from the small Belgian delegation N-VA.
This time around, the hard-right ECR group could receive two vice-presidencies and three chairmanships.
With a rapprochement between the ECR’s leader, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, and the EPP, we could see the ECR score more influential jobs this time around.
Bits of the week
Follow the elections live with Euractiv. Elections started officially this Thursday, in the Netherlands. Our newsroom and its network of correspondents across the continent has got your back, providing you with updates on exit polls, analysis, and recommended reads all the way up until next Monday. Look at the latest projections by Europe Elects, learn about parties fighting for power, and follow us live.
First turnout rates are out. The few countries that already opened the polls for early-bird voters are providing hints of participation levels, data shows. Only 9% of the Estonians, who started voting on Tuesday, cast their votes. Conversely, the Finns have had a record-breaking turnout of 25%, followed by the Swedes at 16%.
Disinformation campaign continues to hit EU elections. As expected, disinformation and foreign malign influence are impacting the continent-wide vote, the Commissioner for Democracy Věra Jourová said on Wednesday. France, Germany, and Poland have become “permanent” targets from the Russians, on topics of migration and security, while there are increasing Russian-spread narratives about the “burden” of the Ukrainian refugees and European troops to Ukraine. In Slovakia, mainstream parties are using pro-Russian disinformation campaigns to attack the opposition.
Hungary answers Belgium’s Lahbib. “It’s no wonder that [Belgian] Foreign Minister Lahbib is anxious about the upcoming elections. These remarks are the last desperate attempt of a government likely to soon fall,” Balázs Orbán, the political director of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, told Euractiv in reaction to comments made by Lahbib on Monday. In an interview with Politico, she urged EU countries to apply Article 7 to strip Hungary of voting rights over continuing rule of law concerns.
If you’d like to contact me for tips, comments, and/or feedback, drop me a line at max.griera@euractiv.com
[Edited by Aurélie Pugnet/Zoran Radosavljevic]
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