PARIS — The fate of Ursula von der Leyen hangs in the balance — and the EU election’s biggest losers are the unlikely kingmakers.
Every vote will count when the European Commission president attempts to convince just over half of the European Parliament’s 720 MEPs to give her a second term. If she fails in a vote on Thursday, it will plunge the EU into an unprecedented political crisis, sending national leaders back to the drawing board to come up with another candidate and ruining a package of top jobs they hammered out last month.
On paper, it’s tight.
To get the 361 votes she needs, von der Leyen has trained her focus mainly on the three groups that supported her back in 2019, when she squeezed through the Parliament by nine votes: her own European People’s Party, the Socialists, and the liberals of Renew.
“I am not a mathematician but I think with the three center forces that are supporting Ursula von der Leyen and that form part of a package deal … we have the numbers,” Pedro López, spokesperson for the parliamentary faction of von der Leyen’s EPP family, said at a press conference Friday.
That’s not a universally held view.
Together the three centrist groups could give her a majority of around 50 MEPs — but that’s only if all those MEPs vote for her in the secret ballot, which is all but guaranteed not to happen. In previous votes for the Commission president, around 13 percent of the informal coalition supporting the candidate has rebelled.
MEPs from all three centrist groups have already gone public to say they won’t vote for von der Leyen. If their votes match their public statements, von der Leyen won’t be able to rely on the likes of Ireland’s Fianna Fáil, France’s Republicans, and liberals in Germany and Romania, among others. Others, such as the French and Italian Socialist delegations, will be hard to convince.
Those worries have driven von der Leyen to hold intensive talks with individual MEPs and political groups in the Parliament, pledging to include their desired policies in her action plan for the next five years.
So far she has held hours-long meetings with her own EPP group, plus the Socialists, liberals and the Greens.
The Socialists will pore over her policy program when it's unveiled publicly Thursday morning, looking for commitments to set up a permanent EU fund like the one the bloc used to help recovery after Covid, plus ambitious policies on social welfare and climate change.
The liberals — one of the biggest losers (a whopping 25 seats) in the
June European election that tipped the Parliament rightward — are now driving up the price of their support, realizing that while they have been weakened, von der Leyen still needs their votes.
“We must be taken into consideration as members of this platform, and that means proof and commitments from Ursula von der Leyen and her political family too,” Renew President Valérie Hayer told reporters in the Parliament last week after her MEPs grilled the Commission president-elect.
Renew appears largely content with von der Leyen’s policy direction but is fuming about its reduced stature in the incoming legislature. Having dropped from the third-largest group to fifth-largest, Renew is set to have only two vice-presidents of the Parliament (it had three last time) and the chairs of three mid-weight committees — unless it can strike a last-minute deal with the bigger political families.
‘Talking not dealing’
The Greens — also punished by voters in the election, losing 18 seats — are signaling
they’re in a pragmatic frame of mind and are ready to do a deal with von der Leyen.
Responding to the EPP’s López, Greens spokesperson Simon McKeagney said at the same press conference: “I’m not a mathematician either, but I’m surprised if they would have the numbers with three [parties].”
Greens Co-President Terry Reintke said: “We are ready to become part of this majority because we see the danger if the majority would move to the right."
Von der Leyen, though, seems unwilling to strike a formal deal with the Greens, perhaps wary that some in her EPP would be strongly opposed, especially as the EPP has waged a battle against her signature Green Deal policy agenda, seeking to transform it into an industrial policy to make Europe more competitive.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Socialists have spent months pressuring von der Leyen not to strike an accord with the hard-right grouping to the EPP’s right, the European Conservatives and Reformists, which is dominated by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s MEPs.
The pressure from the Socialists — backed by Renew and the Greens — to apply a
cordon sanitaire to the ECR has forced von der Leyen to clarify that there will be no “structural coordination” with the ECR as a whole, as she told the Renew group last week, according to a person in the room.
But von der Leyen is nonetheless looking to attract support from individual ECR MEPs and delegations — not least the 24 Brothers of Italy lawmakers — as long as she believes they support the EU and the rule of law, as well as Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.
ECR Co-President Nicola Procaccini said Thursday he can't see his MEPs voting for von der Leyen at the moment, although much will depend on the ECR group's meeting with her on Tuesday.
“One thing is talking to each other, and another thing is dealing,” said Margaritis Schinas, Greece’s EU commissioner who hails from von der Leyen’s EPP family. “I don’t see any deals with political groups beyond the three."
Other EPP heavyweights, such as former
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, have warned von der Leyen and EPP chief Manfred Weber against courting the support of Meloni’s MEPs.
With even von der Leyen’s own EPP not unanimous in supporting her, however, she might end up needing support from ECR ranks. One in five delegates at the EPP congress in Bucharest in March voted against her, while the party's French and Slovenian delegates have said they won't back her in Thursday's vote.
But Schinas said that none of those who had raised doubts about von der Leyen in public had done the same at a recent summit of the EPP political family in Portugal, which “is also telling.”
Von der Leyen’s conservative allies have argued that voting against her would be a gift to the populist right across the continent at a time of massive geopolitical instability.
An upset this week would also likely mean that the Commission won't be up and running until 2025.
“There is only plan A, there is no plan B,” Schinas said.
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