For the first time in history there is the possibility that the next European Parliament, which will be elected this weekend by the eligible voters of all the member states of the Union, will be led by a right-wing majority: it would be a historic change in its own way , given that since its establishment in 1979, the European Parliament has always been guided by a transversal majority made up of centre-right, centre-left and centre-liberal parties. This was also the case in the outgoing legislature.
At the moment the shift to the right remains, in fact, a possibility. According to polls, the most likely outcome of the European elections is that the current majority manages to maintain the numbers to govern and hold the majority of institutional positions. But in an election held simultaneously in 27 countries, and in which more or less 200 million people vote, there are many variables.
The current Parliament
It is a different thread compared to the moment he was elected, in 2019: as in every legislature there were movements from one group to another, expulsions, national parties that never found their place. However, the situation in broad terms has not changed: the three main groups of the centre-right, centre-left and liberal center have retained the majority and managed the work for five years, choosing which laws to give priority to and constantly negotiating on the final versions to be agreed with the Council of the European Union, i.e. the body in which the 27 national governments of the Union are represented and which together with the European Parliament holds legislative power.
The outgoing Parliament has 705 members. The European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right political group, controls 177 seats. The Socialists and Democrats (S&D) 140, the liberal Renew group 102. Together they reach 419, around seventy seats above the absolute majority, i.e. 353.
It is a sufficient margin to allow the majority to protect itself from possible vetoes from individual parliamentarians, and very often also from dissenting votes from currents within national groups and parties. On the individual measures, in the last legislature majorities were formed that were more to the left – with the inclusion of the Greens, and the exclusion of part of the PPE and Renew – or more to the right, formed by PPE, Renew and ECR, i.e. the far-right group with which the EPP has the greatest points of contact.
The most up-to-date projections
In recent months, various projections have been released on the distribution of seats in the next European Parliament, based on surveys carried out on a national basis. These are very complicated calculations, also because they must take into account the fact that we vote with 27 different electoral laws, each with its own thresholds and seat distribution systems.
In any case, one of the most recent projections was released by Euronews, an authoritative media that covers Europe and European institutions extensively. According to estimates by Euronews the current majority will emerge very thin from the elections: the EPP should obtain 181 seats, the S&D 136 while Renew 81, for a total of 398 seats. Due to a recalculation of the European population, the total seats will go from 705 to 720. The absolute majority will therefore be at 361: the coalition would have an advantage of just under 40 seats, therefore approximately half compared to the outgoing legislature.
(Graph by Euronews)
What to keep an eye on
Even a possible right-wing majority should exceed 361. If we take the forecasts of Euronews a possible alliance between the EPP and the two far-right groups, namely Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID), would reach 327 seats, i.e. just under 40 from an absolute majority. A pretty clear distance, but not huge either.
To understand whether an alternative majority can really emerge, it will be necessary to observe above all the results in certain countries, i.e. the most populous. In the European Parliament, each member country has a fixed quota of parliamentarians that it can elect, established on the basis of its population: the more inhabitants a certain country has, the more European parliamentarians it can elect. Germany, the country with the largest number of inhabitants in the European Union, alone elects 96 seats: followed by France with 79 and Italy with 76.
Consequently, only the parties of the most populous countries can “move” a fair number of seats, both negatively and positively. In France, for example, Éric Zemmour’s far-right party, Reconquête!, is polled at 6 percent, just above the threshold which in France is set at 5 percent. If it were to actually pass it, it would get 5-6 MEPs: that is, more or less the same as the total number of MEPs elected by Luxembourg, which will be 6.
– Read also: The Post’s live video on the results of the European elections
In a nutshell, and cutting things with a hatchet, for a right-wing majority to truly emerge, the centre-left parties need to do worse than expected and those on the right and especially the far right do even better than what the polls say, which damage growing almost everywhere compared to 2019.
Right-wing and far-right parties have an advantage in several European countries: above all France, where the Rassemblement National second Euronews should be able to elect 28 European parliamentarians, and Italy, where the polls consistently show Brothers of Italy as the first party and for which projections of Euronews they allocate 23 seats. In Poland, the party that led the country in a semi-authoritarian manner from 2015 to 2023, Law and Justice, is currently expected to elect 18 European parliamentarians.
Even in various medium-sized countries the far right has an advantage: in Austria the Freedom Party is estimated at around 30 percent and is expected to elect 6 parliamentarians, in the Netherlands Geert Wilders’ party is expected to obtain a percentage even higher than the one that made him win the parliamentary elections, seven months ago, and elect 9 parliamentarians.
If all these parties obtain better results than expected, the approximately 40 seats needed to form a right-wing majority could become 30 or even less.
At that point other parliamentarians could be gathered into the large group of non-members, which at the moment has at least two parties that will elect several European parliamentarians: Fidesz, i.e. the party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who according to Euronews is expected to elect 10 parliamentarians, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the main German far-right party, which is expected to elect just under twenty.
Not to mention that far-right parliamentary groups that are stronger than in the last elections could exert a force of attraction for national parties that previously sat in more moderate groups: in the Czech Republic, barring any surprises, the elections will be won by ANO, a right-wing populist party led by former prime minister Andrej Babiš who should elect around ten European parliamentarians. At the moment ANO sits in the Renew group but Babiš has already made it clear that it could end up elsewhere: we are talking above all about the far-right group ECR.
All these steps are by no means a given: it is not a given that the far-right parties will obtain better results compared to current polls, it is not a given that the EPP wants to form a stable coalition with the parties to its right, abandoning its historical allies, the Socialists and Liberals, and it is not a given that AfD will find a new parliamentary group after being expelled from ID for its extremism. Just as it is not a given that the two far-right groups will agree to cooperate on a stable basis. There are various differences between ECR and ID, especially on the approach to be taken towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia: the Dutch news site NRC he calculated that in the European Parliament they vote the same way in 60 percent of cases. It’s not a low percentage, but not a very high one either.
In conclusion: a possible right-wing majority governing the work of the next European Parliament is a possibility, but at the moment it is not the most probable one. For it to become concrete, many factors must align: we will only be able to come up with a more precise idea in the days following the elections.
