Amid discontent to her left and right, VDL will be subjected to a no-confidence vote next week
The goal is to warn but not bring down the EU president, but a motley crew of far right and centre left detractors could accidentally cause the Commission to collapse.
What started as a far-right objection to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s handling of the Covid pandemic is now spiralling into something that could, in an unlikely but possible scenario, bring down the entire European Union executive. A no-confidence vote in President von der Leyen has been scheduled for next Thursday at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, following a debate on Monday in which the EU president will defend herself to MEPs. Such censure motions aren’t as rare as you might think - the last (failed) one was against Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014. But this time, the math is not in von der Leyen’s favour. The far-right plot comes as the centre-left partners in her majority coalition controlling the parliament are furious about her climate back-tracking, as I wrote last week. The unlikely-but-possible risk is that many MEPs from the left could join the far right in the secret ballot next week, intending just to send the president a message but accidentally coming over the line and causing the dismissal of von der Leyen and her entire college of 27 commissioners.
The Romanian far-right MEP, Gheorghe Piperea, part of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists group, filed the motion of censure last month in response to the EU high court’s recent ruling that the Commission was wrong to refuse to release von der Leyen’s private texts with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2021. To the surprise of many, the petition for censure started gathering signatures rapidly from all over the political spectrum, including from MEPs in von der Leyen’s own centre-right EPP group, although they later retracted their signature when they realised it was getting close to meeting the threshold. In the end 72 MEPs have signed the motion - enough to force the vote.