With the European People’s Party in power, it is perfectly positioned to shift EU policy to the right. “We are the party of industry, the party of the countryside, the party of European farmers,” Manfred Weber, the European People’s Party’s parliamentary group leader, recently told Politico.
The EPP could again join a grand coalition government with the Socialists and Liberals, but if it can do so without alienating its centrist allies, it could also negotiate cooperation on some issues with more right-wing parties.
The far-right wins big
As polls predicted, the far-right made strong gains across the EU. In France, the Rally National won almost a third of the vote, cementing its position as the leading ultranationalist group in the next parliament. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy made similar gains, with more than a quarter of voters backing the group.
The two far-right groups in the European Parliament, European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity Democrats (ID), will together hold 131 seats in parliament. This number does not include 15 MEPs from the Alternative for Germany, 10 from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, six from Poland’s Union party and three from Bulgaria’s pro-Kremlin Reconstruction party.
Meloni’s rise in Italy has weakened the League, once the leading Identity and Democracy group, which lost two-thirds of its seats on Sunday. In Spain, Vox has been similarly weakened by a new party called The Party is Finished, led by far-right internet celebrity Alvise Pérez. The new group won the three seats Vox would have won, doubling its number of seats and giving Vox six MPs in Brussels for the next term.
If the far-right were to form a single group, it would be the second-largest force in Parliament after the traditionally dominant European People’s Party. While internal divisions and disagreements within the far-right make such a scenario unlikely, its sheer size would put pressure on EU policy from the right.
