The EU Parliament now has a right-wing majority
President von der Leyen's centre-right EPP yesterday broke the centrist coalition, joining with the far right in order to pass the climate deregulation demanded by Trump.
She’s gone and done it. After months of threats, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP) yesterday shunned the European Parliament’s centrist governing majority coalition and broke the firewall against the far right. Breaking this cordon sanitaire was what US Vice President JD Vance demanded of them in his Munich Security Conference speech nine months ago, and now the EPP has obliged. And they did so in order to pass legislation, initially blocked by their erstwhile partners the centre-left S&D and liberal Renew Europe, dismantling EU climate legislation as a “concession” to Trump (to use a Commission official’s word).
The Omnibus law, the first item in President von der Leyen’s deregulatory drive, will strike down recently-passed legislation that would have required companies operating in Europe to make sustainability declarations about their climate impacts. That would have included US companies, and the Trump administration didn’t like that. As part of her surrender deal with President Trump in July, President von der Leyen promised to gut the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). But her omnibus legislation to do that was rejected by rebel S&D and Liberal MEPs in a vote at the end of October – even though the two groups’ leadership had endorsed it in a compromise. In order to get the legislation passed, yesterday the EPP allied with: the far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE) group of Marine Le Pen, Vikor Orban and Geert Wilders; the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group of Giorgia Meloni and Karol Nawrocki; and the ESN of Alternative for Germany. Together, those three far-right groups hold 190 of the 720 seats in the Parliament, while the centre-right EPP holds 188. Together, they have majority – but the EPP has not been willing to use it on a major vote until now.
What happened yesterday has huge implications not only for the future of Democracy, but also for the future of EU governance. As Harvard democracy fellow Alberto Alemanno noted yesterday:
“For the first time in EU history, the pro-EU centrist parties that have built and governed the EU since its inception are being sidelined. And they bear responsibility for their own demise. Today’s EU Parliament vote on the Omnibus Simplification Directive not only dismantles the Green Deal but also redefines the political majority governing Europe from now until 2029.”
“As of today, von der Leyen’s political majority will be the right and far-right only, with devastating repercussions for the EU’s economy, society, and democratic foundations, enabling the US administration to double down on its influence over the EU.”
This political reconfiguration echoes what has been happening nationally in Europe for some time.