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Since 1979, the year of the first direct elections to the European parliament, supporters of closer EU integration have demanded more powers for the assembly to improve the bloc’s effectiveness and democratic accountability. Successive reforms, culminating in the 2009 Lisbon treaty, granted the parliament a bigger role in EU policymaking. It lacks the all-round powers of national legislatures in democracies around the world, but it enjoys considerable sway over virtually all EU activities.
Now, with the 10th elections to the assembly four months away, it looks as if the parliament could turn for the first time into a hindrance to the EU’s ambitions rather than a vehicle for advancing them. At a time when Europe is grappling with Russian hostility, tensions with China and the possibility of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the EU elections are set to deliver a result with damaging implications for Europe’s cohesion, influence and standing in the world.
Across the 27-nation bloc, hard-right parties are expected to gain enough seats to alter the balance of power in the parliament in ways never seen since the EU’s founding Treaty of Rome in 1957. For decades, centre-right, liberal and centre-left party groups have dominated the assembly, allowing it to push forward integrationist policies that have often gone farther than many national governments wanted.
After the June elections, this centrist majority will probably shrink. According to some predictions, the hard right will come first in as many as nine countries and second or third in another nine. The hard right will then be in a position to impede or change policies in areas central to Europe’s future and the EU’s sense of mission.
The chief examples are migration and asylum, the rule of law, climate change, international trade, the EU budget and the bloc’s proposed enlargement into eastern and south-eastern Europe. In such cases, the hard right will seek to alter the content or direction of EU policies by joining forces with centre-right parties, which have increasingly borrowed hard-right themes of national identity and sovereignty in an attempt to shore up their electoral support.
Co-operation between the hard right and more moderate right will not amount to a formal alliance. But it is likely to coincide with a more prominent representation of the hard right in the EU’s two other major decision-making bodies — the executive European Commission and the European Council, which groups national governments.
The larger the hard right’s gains in the EU elections, the stronger its claim will be to several portfolios in the new commission, which will be appointed after the vote. In the council, hard-right parties are already a force in or behind governments in Hungary, Italy and Sweden, with the Netherlands soon to follow and probably Austria, too, after its elections later this year.
The EU has drifted towards tougher migration and asylum policies since the refugee and migrant crisis of 2015-2016, but this trend will surely be amplified after the June elections. On the rule of law, it may be harder to find a majority in the EU assembly for a forceful line against a government perceived as a democratic backslider such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Climate change, on which the EU likes to portray itself as a world leader, will also become a hotly contested area. Laws adopted over the past five years under the EU’s Green Deal are unlikely to be reversed, but the expected shift to the right in the EU legislature may delay or derail the next steps needed to reach the bloc’s net zero goals. In a sign of the way the wind is blowing, Brussels made concessions this month to protesting farmers on pesticide use, nature conservation and targets for cutting agricultural emissions.
Another area to watch is trade, where a long-planned deal with the South American bloc Mercosur, already in trouble, may be paralysed by a more rightwing EU legislature. It will be no easier to make progress on the far-reaching institutional and budgetary reforms required to make a reality of EU enlargement to the east. Hard-right politicians dislike a Franco-German initiative to expand majority voting in foreign policy and the budget as it would reduce national veto powers.
From the eurozone debt and migration crises to the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has fought hard and with some success in the past 15 years against a tide of events that threatened to overwhelm it. The difference this time is that, after June, the centrist, integrationist consensus that underpinned the EU’s efforts to meet these challenges will be much weakened.