“The center is holding,” a triumphant Ursula von der Leyen declared on the night of the EU elections in June, after her European People’s Party (EPP) expectedly retained its place as the largest group in the European Parliament for the sixth time in a row.
Although her name wasn’t even on the ballot, ‘“Queen Ursula”—President of the European Commission—flaunted the EPP’s victory as a personal achievement. “We won the European elections. We are by far the strongest party. We are the anchor of stability. We will build a bastion against the extremes from the left and from the right.”
By directly contrasting “us” with the “extremes,” von der Leyen delegitimizes everyone who does not belong in her camp. By invoking the image of a siege, she suggests being under attack by these supposed agents of chaos.
For once, von der Leyen is right. The “center” is under attack, albeit not by obscure, malign forces but by ordinary Europeans. People who have had enough of this deceptive tale, who are tired of their legitimate concerns being dismissed as foreign propaganda. People who reject the mainstream parties’ misappropriation of democracy and exclusion of opinions that do not conform with their preferred worldview.
Yes, in 2024, Von der Leyen’s centre held on to the position atop the Brussels hierarchy that it has occupied for the past two and a half decades. But things are not as they seem. Those claiming that Queen Ursula is now in a stronger position than ever are deluding themselves. The political revolution in the heart of Europe has already begun.
Von der Leyen’s centrist victory quickly starts to fade when we look at the dramatically changed European Parliament. Although the EPP and S&D—the largest of the mainstream “center” parties and gatekeepers of the old politics—were able to retain their seats, their traditional allies, the Renew and the Greens were decimated by the voters. Meanwhile, the conservative blocs (PfE, ECR, and ESN) gained previously unimaginable grounds in the Parliament and together account for 26% of the seats (up from 16%), which is equal to EPP’s share. The Patriots for Europe group, which replaced the old and often belittled ID group, is now the third-largest political force in Brussels and de facto leaders of the conservative right.
The past six months in Brussels have already shown that great changes are in motion and every step the establishment takes to contain them will only exacerbate its downfall.
First, when von der Leyen faced reelection as Commission President by MEPs in July, there was a real possibility that the center’s ‘Ursula coalition’ (EPP, S&D, and Renew) would not be able to carry the vote alone due to the seats it had lost. She needed additional support from either the Greens—who by then started to grow hostile toward the Commission chief for daring to give even symbolic concessions on climate targets to farmers—or Giorgia Meloni’s conservative ECR.
Gaining the latter for the cause would have provided a much stronger base, but fearing backlash from the left, von der Leyen settled for the Greens instead, angering Italy’s Meloni—the only EU leader among the bigger member states whose democratic legitimacy was strengthened, and not undermined, by the EU elections.
Voters were suddenly faced with the reality that despite electing a significantly more right-wing Parliament, the leading coalition had countered by ignoring the democratic will of the people and becoming even more left-wing.
Von der Leyen and her centrist coalition reluctantly decided to offer one conservative faction some recognition by giving Meloni’s ECR seats both in the EP Bureau and the leadership of 13 committees. The Patriots, on the other hand, suffered the greatest injustice in Parliament’s history by being placed under a cordon sanitaire.
To prevent the Patriots from taking the pre-allocated committee positions which their 84 seats had earned, the Ursula coalition had to violate basic democratic principles laid out in the Parliament’s internal rules—not just about fair representation but also their precious gender balance. It’s one thing to deny committee seats to a fringe group with two dozen MEPs, and it’s another when you wall off the third-largest bloc in Brussels while much smaller groups on the left remain massively overrepresented.
To be fair, von der Leyen’s center had no other option but to keep the Patriots in isolation. After carefully cultivating their “us vs. them” narrative for years, they simply couldn’t allow Patriots like Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, or Matteo Salvini to be treated equally. But by choosing to keep the cordon up, the center was forced to reveal the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of EU governance as well as their willingness to carry out such obvious abuses of power.
We can only guess what the European Court of Justice’s verdict will be in the Patriots’ subsequent lawsuit against the Parliament, but it doesn’t truly matter. Whether the court lets Queen Ursula get away with it, or (as seems unlikely) admits that Brussels’ so-called “democratic forces” have violated democracy to suit their political agenda, the result will be the same: the further erosion of their credibility in the eyes of the voters.
Still, it wasn’t until the negotiations over membership of the new Commission that the center’s weakened position became glaringly obvious.
To set things right with Meloni and win further favors from the ECR, von der Leyen put forth Italy’s Raffaele Fitto as one of the five executive vice presidents of the new Commission. The leftist backlash over allowing a conservative into the highest circle of the EU executive was enormous.
The Socialists, liberals of Renew, and Greens all issued different threats and ultimatums, vowing to withdraw their support from the president and vote down the entire college of commissioners. After weeks of petty powerplays and postponements, the EPP eventually managed to force a deal onto its partners—although the Parliament approved the college with a record low support rate at only 54%.
The damage was done and the lesson learned: a single semi-important concession to conservatives nearly collapsed von der Leyen’s famously stable “center.” Although posing as the undefeated champions of democracy six months ago, by now, the EU elites have begun to lose every bit of credibility propping up that image.
We have a Parliament that actively prevents the democratic will of Europeans from being fairly represented in the decision-making process (and will have to defend this position in court); an EU executive branch that advocates for more power while having the lowest democratic legitimacy in EU history; and a Commission president who was reinstalled by those most punished by their voters and only because of the lack of better alternatives. All thanks to the right-wing shift in the EU elections and the establishment’s desperate attempts to cling to their former glory.
The centre is not holding, but disintegrating under the strain of trying to hold back democracy. There will be plenty of opportunities to increase the pressure in 2025.
