CNN
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This is a historic and pivotal year for democracies around the world. In 2024, nearly 70 countries will hold elections, from the United States to South Africa, Mexico to Taiwan.
But after six weeks of massive voting in India, the biggest election in terms of voter turnout will be held next week, when 373 million Europeans will go to the polls to elect the next 720 members of the European Parliament.
The results, once votes from across the 27-nation European Union are counted, are widely expected to show a major shift to the right and could have a major impact on the political direction of a bloc that is battling multiple crises, many of them global.
From the war in Ukraine to dealing with mass migration, from the rise of China to the threat of climate change, it is hard to imagine how a diverse collection of countries can speak with one voice.
Of course, disagreements between member states are nothing new: EU politics have always relied on awkward alliances between nations and political ideologies representing vastly different constituencies.
But there has been an unmistakable shift to the right in the EU’s political centre over the past two decades.
François Grouet/SIPA/AP
Marine Le Pen, a member of the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) party, could take power in France with her National Rally party within the next five years.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the European Parliament at the EU level: most of the Members of Parliament (known as MEPs) belong to their own country’s political parties. Once in the European Parliament in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, they find themselves in loosely organized transnational political groupings with broadly similar political interests.
These groups then form more loose coalitions, usually resulting in a majority of centre-left, centre-right and a liberal centrist somewhere in between.
The shift to the right of the political centre in this coalition has been gradual: in 1994, the main socialist group S&D had the most MEPs. In 1999, it was overtaken by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).
The European People’s Party, best described as a conservative movement similar to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has been a dominant force in EU politics ever since.
While the European People’s Party has been able to lead a mainstream coalition of leftists, liberals and centres at the European level, MEPs remain tied to the domestic politics of their own countries.
For example, conservatives will find it difficult to work with liberals on a pan-EU policy of burden-sharing for asylum seekers when domestic voters are drawn to vocal anti-immigration populists. The louder domestic voices become, and the greater the risk of losing their own seats, the more complicated bipartisan politics become at the Brussels level.
The expected influx of MPs into the right-wing group of the European People’s Party (EPP) will undoubtedly complicate things.
Christoph Reichwein/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
The ID group has been trying to soften its image and recently expelled itself from Germany’s AfD after a senior MEP made comments about the SS.
The right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the far-right Identity Democrats (ID) are projected to come in fourth and fifth in the number of seats respectively, but a Politico poll suggests that their combined total could be more than 140 seats, making them hard for the EPP to ignore. The EPP is currently projected to win 165 seats, while the socialist Social and Democrats (S&D) are projected to win 143 seats.
ECR and ID are typical of European Parliamentary parties with a fairly broad conservative grouping.
For example, the ECR was founded by former British Prime Minister and anti-Brexit campaigner David Cameron, and its current chair is Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who attracted attention in the 2022 Italian general election by promising to oppose LGBTQ+ rights and to curb anti-immigration and anti-globalist rhetoric.
But since his election, Meloni has been seen as a fairly moderate, supporting many of the EU’s key initiatives, including aiding Ukraine, and opposing Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban’s move to join the European Communist Party after he left the European People’s Party.
Hungary has been the most pro-Russian voice in the EU since the start of the war, and whether Meloni intended it or not, her resistance to Orbán has made cooperation with her and the European Commission more palatable to the Brussels establishment, including EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The ID is also trying to soften its image. It recently expelled Germany’s far-right AfD party from its ranks after one of its most senior lawmakers told an Italian newspaper that it did not automatically consider all members of the notorious Nazi paramilitary SS to be criminals.
Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu/Getty Images
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has assumed a more moderate stance in office than expected, opposing Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s bid to join the European Central Bank.
There is a considerable range of opinion, from moderates in the ERC to extremes in the ID, but political currents and the desire for influence can sometimes lead to strange alliances, especially in the opaque and fluid world of European politics.
The EPP is unlikely to cooperate directly with ID anytime soon, but that doesn’t make ID unimportant. History has repeatedly shown that it’s possible to influence policy from outside the party. Suppose a party with ties to ID started pressuring centre-right politicians in its own country. The centres might adopt their policies. This has happened before in France, the UK and Germany.
And there are plenty of hot topics in Europe right now for the right to bite on: immigration, climate change, border security, military spending, the rule of law — all of these have long been pan-European political issues and aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. And it is ultimately up to the newly elected parliament to review and approve the composition of the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission.
It is worth noting that support for Ukraine appears safe for the time being and that pro-Kremlin groups appear to be quite isolated, but if the numbers continue to trend that way, pretty much everything else will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and the more MEPs to the right of the European People’s Party are elected, the more their influence could grow over time.
Five years is a long time in politics, and this parliament will last that long. In the meantime, France will hold elections in which Marine Le Pen, also from the ID, may win with her National Rally party. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, also from the ID, is expected to win the November general election and form a government soon. This means that the member states’ domestic politics could shift further to the right, which would of course change the calculations in Brussels.
The European Parliament often appears to be a boring bureaucracy, going through tedious procedures. But the EU is increasingly playing a geopolitical role: it can impose sanctions on Russian and Chinese politicians, provide funds to Ukraine, and use its economic might as the world’s largest trading bloc for diplomacy. If the EU’s political centre is truly shifting to the right, it will inevitably have meaningful, and perhaps far-reaching, effects on people living beyond Europe’s borders.
