European elections were supposed to be the far right’s day. But the center held.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen poses at the European People's Party headquarters in Brussels, June 9, 2024.
Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP
Berlin
The results for European Parliament elections are mostly in, and the projected hard-right surge turned out to be more of an inching.
Centrist parties will continue to hold a vast majority of the 720 seats in Parliament – at least 400, or 450 including Green parties. And the far right will take barely more than a dozen new seats, says Jacob Kirkegaard, political economist and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
“This was really a continuity election at the European level,” Dr. Kirkegaard says. “But what will be different, is that it’s clear these elections have caused significant shifts in a number of the national political systems in member states.”
Why We Wrote This
Going into European Parliamentary elections, most expected a big result for the far right. It did gain – but not nearly as much as anticipated. Instead, continuity ruled the day.
EU elections notoriously gather little interest, with voter turnout at about 50% across the bloc. But they matter immensely at the national level, producing repercussions that have only begun. While hard-right nationalists showed major gains in France, Italy, and Germany, they petered out in many countries.
In Poland, the center-to-center-right coalition led by Donald Tusk cemented the turn away from the hard-line conservatives they’d triumphed over in October’s parliamentary elections.
Notably, in Hungary, authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party still drew the largest share of votes, but close behind was a center-right party that garnered 30%, representing the first “really serious domestic political challenge to Orbán in over a decade,” says Dr. Kirkegaard.
The hard right also didn’t do as well as expected in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Belgium.
The relative status quo means that Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, will likely be reelected by the new EU Parliament to another term. Her EU political group, made up of center-right parties from across Europe, easily topped all competitors.
And Greens and liberals lost seats across the bloc, though the Greens were coming down from an unusually strong showing in 2019. Even so, the environmentally friendly policy gains of the last few years shouldn’t be easy to water down, says Dr. Kirkegaard.
“The European Union’s climate response in the last five years has been extraordinarily strong, and now it is legislated, in the law,” he says. “The [far right] is not a coherent group of political parties that can get together and set the agenda.”
Domestic effects to come?
Still, there will be significant domestic ramifications from the far right’s gains in the biggest EU countries.
France’s far right under Marine Le Pen did so well – double the share of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party – that Mr. Macron has called risky snap elections for June 30 which could effectively end the centrist, EU-loving president’s ability to take any governmental action.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany thumped the three parties that make up the ruling coalition under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, moving from 11% to 16% of the vote, foreboding trouble for Mr. Scholz ahead of next year’s federal elections.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party won almost 29%, even though the center left was only a step behind. That gives Ms. Meloni – one of the clear winners of the election – a strong negotiating position going into the G7 relative to France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz, says Arturo Varvelli, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Rome.
“In the next few weeks she will be able to play, if she wants to, a decisive role in shaping the new arrangements in Brussels,” says Mr. Varvelli.
And the overall boost in presence that the nationalist parties will enjoy in Brussels will have some repercussions, as centrist parties may need to make concessions on issues such as migration policy and funding for Ukraine.
For example, in Germany, parties that don’t support the country’s current level of funding for Ukraine won almost 25% of the domestic EU vote.
“This has no direct impact on Germany’s foreign policy course,” says Jana Puglierin, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, “but increases the pressure on politicians” to pay attention to apparent public desire to decrease funding for Ukraine.