The first day of the EU leaders’ summit yielded almost exactly the result everyone was expecting. Yet it is still hard to accept that Ursula von der Leyen’s center-left coalition so easily retained its power, despite the European voters’ clear demand for a change of direction.
On Thursday night, a qualified majority of the national leaders in the European Council (EUCO) chose to nominate von der Leyen (as the centrist European People’s Party EPP’s lead candidate) for a second term at the helm of the European Commission
The other two top jobs were carved up between the socialist S&D, whose ex-Portuguese PM António Costa will be the next EUCO president, and the liberal Renew, which bagged the EU’s foreign affairs chief’s position for Estonian PM Kaja Kallas.
The agreement, backed by the EPP-S&D-Renew coalition, “is wrong in method and substance. I have decided not to support it out of respect for the citizens and the indications that came from those citizens in the elections,” Italian PM Giorgia Meloni wrote on X afterward.
It’s worth noting that two of the three top jobs are given to politicians entangled in major corruption scandals and under pending investigations, confirming the conventional wisdom that Brussels appointments are the epitome of ‘failing upwards,’
Von der Leyen’s court hearing about Pfizergate—potentially the biggest conflict of interest case in European history—has been conveniently postponed until December while Costa’s socialist cabinet collapsed less than a year ago under the weight of one of the biggest-ever Portuguese corruption scandals.
Similarly ironic is that the EU’s chief diplomat will be a woman, Kaja Kallas, who was considered by allies a ‘loose cannon’—too hawkishly anti-Russia—to be given charge of NATO, her original bid earlier this year.
The deal was backed by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez, among others, all of whom were rejected to varying degrees by their own voters during June’s elections for the European Parliament.
In contrast, Meloni, the only major European leader who came out of the election with a stronger democratic mandate, was ignored and sidelined during the discussions as the von der Leyen bloc reached the required threshold even without Italy’s support.
In other words, this electoral cycle once again underlines the serious democratic deficiencies of the European Union, as leaders and factions who fail at the ballots still get to put unelected bureaucrats in charge of 450 million people.
The Italian PM also vowed to keep working to increase Rome’s weight in Brussels, meaning that she would try to negotiate an executive vice presidency in the Commission paired with an influential portfolio. The price of that, however, will probably be her party’s backing of von der Leyen when the European Parliament votes on these nominees in two weeks—another ‘backroom’ deal that her similarly sidelined conservative allies might not appreciate.
Indeed, von der Leyen, Costa, and Kallas will still need to be confirmed by an absolute majority in Strasbourg, meaning 361 MEPs out of the 720. The center-left ‘Ursula-coalition’ barely has the numbers and might have to face an unusually large number of defectors during the vote, which means they now need to win over some from either the Greens or Meloni’s European Conservative and Reformist (ECR) group.
Others in the ECR, however, are not as eager to haggle with the EPP after it decided to keep its original coalition partners despite the conservatives overtaking the liberals as the third largest in the European Parliament. A good Commission post for Italy might appease Meloni, but might even drive a wedge between her and the others in the ECR if she goes ahead and supports von der Leyen after the much-detested deal.
The deal was likewise protested by other conservative leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who questioned the democratic nature of the center-left coalition and called the outcome a “shameful agreement” based on “lies and deceit:”
It is a simple power grab carried out by three parties—the EPP, the socialists, and the liberals—which is an affront to the European voters, who mostly voted for the Right and wanted to see a right-wing European leadership. But the EPP collected some of the right-wing votes and then took them to the Left, thus deceiving the European voters.
This is the party coalition of lies and deceit, which does not take into account the poor performance of the past five years, nor is it about programs for the next five years. It is a simple power grab [and an] abuse of power.
At the same time, Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party—commanding 11 of the country’s 21 total seats in Brussels, has confirmed that it would not join either ECR nor Marine Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy (ID), but attempts to forge its own parliamentary group and is confident to reach the required threshold by the July 4th deadline.
The Hungarians haven’t specified who they intend to team up with, but Budapest was most probably referring to a possible Central European political family emerging around populist parties within the Visegrad Group, a long-standing cooperation format between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Czechia.
ECR’s second-largest delegation, the Polish Law and Justice (PiS), is reportedly at odds with Meloni over the direction she has been taking the group lately and is in talks with others in Central Europe to create a new EP group that focuses on regional cooperation born out of common interests, rather than ideology and party politics.
As PiS’ ex-PM Mateusz Morawiecki explained just before the summit:
It’s quite obvious that we could be united on a geographical platform and not [an] ideological platform. I’m less and less interested in all those ideological elements of the jigsaw.”
Any new outfit in Brussels would require at least 23 MEPs from seven delegations. PiS and Fidesz together would already surpass the required number of seats but need five more parties to make their ‘Visegrad+’ group a reality.
Potential allies could include the Czech ex-PM Andrej Babiš’s liberal-conservative ANO party—which recently quit Renew and is set to retake the government soon—and maybe Slovak PM Robert Fico’s Smer and Slovenia’s right-wing SDS which also delivered a devastating defeat to the country’s ruling progressive-left coalition. Both Smer and SDS, however, denied having any intention to join for now, but things can change quickly in Brussels.
Visegrad governments were known for their strong cooperation against Brussels’ leftist ideological dominance a while ago, but the friendship seemed to have been put on pause because of differences about the war in Ukraine. The necessity of the changing political landscape, however, might just bring old allies back together once again.
