Ursula von der Leyen achieved her 2019 European Commission presidency only thanks to a razor-thin majority of nine votes in the European Parliament, POLITICO reports.
This year, the numbers game required to secure a second term in a potentially much more hostile European Parliament after the June 6-9 EU elections looks even more difficult. There is a very real chance that the German politician simply won’t have enough votes.
To get the chance to once again run the EU from the 13th floor of the Commission’s Brussels headquarters in Berlaymont, von der Leyen needs to overcome two major political hurdles.
First, she must win the support of a qualified majority of the 27 EU leaders around the European Council table at a post-election meeting at the end of June. Second, she must get at least 361 votes from the 720 members of the European Parliament to confirm the leaders’ choice during a subsequent secret ballot in Parliament.
On the Council front, things are even simpler. Von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) has 12 EU heads of state and government to its credit, and one would expect all of them to rally behind her. But there is always the danger that things could go wrong: Emmanuel Macron of France could choose a different candidate, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz belongs to the Socialist camp. So far, however, national leaders are not giving her a splitting political migraine: This is parliament.
What the polls show
According to polls, von der Leyen’s EPP will be the largest group in parliament after the election, winning 170 seats. To create a majority, she will have to offer favours to the other big centrist groups – the Socialists and the Liberals – in post-election trade. The deals will depend on which countries get top posts in Brussels – trade and economic posts in the commission – and which political parties get leading roles on parliamentary committees.
Even so, we need to get out our calculators and calculate how the numbers add up. You can be sure that’s exactly what von der Leyen will do.
Counting votes
If she manages to secure the support of the EPP, the liberal group Renew Europe, as well as the Socialists and Democrats, that would amount to about 390 seats, according to the POLITICO poll.
That would put her over the 361-seat threshold, however, not everything is as easy as it seems. Experts and political insiders warn that even if party leaders order support for von der Leyen, it’s likely that more than 10 per cent of lawmakers in each of those groups will oppose her or abstain on the big day.
With a 10 per cent dropout rate, von der Leyen’s total vote would be 351, 10 short of the critical number. And that’s a generous estimate: According to political insiders POLITICO spoke to for this article, the percentage of rebels will almost certainly exceed 10 per cent, even within von der Leyen’s EPP itself. In previous votes, the number of rebels who disagree with the party line has ranged from 13 to 28 per cent.
In 2019, von der Leyen won a majority of nine votes thanks to the support of the EPP, Renewal and S&D. She also received some votes from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. She is unlikely to get these two camps in this election. Von der Leyen has come down hard on PiS and Fidesz for their rule of law failures, and her administration has exposed them as embarrassing bloc stains.
Socialists and Liberals in the voting
Speaking of the Socialists and Liberals, a growing number of their MEPs may reject von der Leyen’s candidacy this year because they are concerned that she is willing to consider an alliance with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. They also accuse her of muting the EU’s green agenda.
There are also bright red signs of danger that the number of rebels within the ranks of her own EPP could be unusually high. France’s Les Républicains party, from which six MEPs are expected, is not in favour, and EPP insiders fear shaky support among the Italian, Spanish and Slovenian delegations. Ominously, at the EPP congress on her nomination in Bucharest in March, 18 per cent of the 499 voting delegates said ‘no’ to von der Leyen.
Recognising this concern about gaining the full support of the EPP rank and file in a secret ballot, a senior EPP insider, on condition of anonymity, said the boss needed to lobby Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in Poland and Spain’s People’s Party. The EPP insider said:
She (von der Leyen) needs to roll her sleeves up and call everyone. She needs to keep doing it until the campaign ends. She needs to push hard to make Spain happen. She needs to push hard to make Poland happen. It takes planning.
In the French EPP dissenting camp, François Xavier Bellamy, a member of the Republicans, said that if the European Commission president is not re-elected, “it will be thanks to our struggle that has left her in a minority in her own party.”
Bellamy represents only a small number of lawmakers, but his suggestion that other national delegations may also oppose von der Leyen – combined with less than overwhelming support for her candidacy at the nomination conference in Bucharest in March – hints at the risk of a significant backlash.
Support from Meloni
Von der Leyen is assiduously courting Italian Prime Minister Meloni, whose support she will need both at the Council table and in Parliament, but this strategy looks likely to backfire. The closer she gets to Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the more votes she will lose from the Socialists and Liberals.
Meloni’s support will be crucial to her nomination to the Council, but her value is less clear in Parliament, where her Brothers of Italy party stands a good chance of winning only about 23 seats.
Those 23 votes will almost certainly be outweighed by the loss of votes from the Socialists, many of whom, especially in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party in Germany, will be pitted against von der Leyen for her affair with Meloni.
The Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew and the Greens have said they will not support von der Leyen’s re-election if she makes any deal with Meloni’s far-right allies in parliament. This may or may not be an empty threat – the terms of such a deal cannot be made public and the vote is secret – but it still raises concerns about the level of support in parliament.
If von der Leyen gives up hope of gaining support from the ECR, she will need support not only from Renew and S&D but also from the Greens to make up the shortfall. Including the Greens, von der Leyen’s projected support base would be 432 votes – more than enough to cross the threshold, even with a significant dropout.
Support from Greens
But nothing is less predictable than how much support she can count on from the Greens, who have not backed von der Leyen in any systematic way back in 2019. Speaking to POLITICO, German Greens lawmaker Daniel Freund noted that the Greens have worked closely with von der Leyen throughout her tenure and could still support her re-election, though such support would come in exchange for a “list of demands.” He asked:
The question is: What do we get if we make a deal to work with her? As Greens we have a long list of demands of things we’d like to change. If we continue the Green Deal, the rule of law, if that is her agenda, my prediction is that this is something very much the Greens can carry.
However, these commitments for the Greens could prove dangerous to von der Leyen’s support among conservatives, who in the final year of her mandate rebelled against key aspects of the Green Deal, namely the phasing out of the internal combustion engine and the Nature Restoration Act.
Adding further uncertainty is the fact that von der Leyen is likely to have to strike any such deals in the frantic negotiations following the European Council meeting at the end of June. Several political groups are pushing for the confirmation of the next Commission president to take place in July, during the last plenary session before the summer recess, leaving her with an extremely narrow window to work out a possibly very difficult coalition deal between Renew, S&D, EPP and the Greens.
While the other factions are pushing for a deal to be done in July, Freund has indicated a willingness to extend the deadline to September – also insisted on by EPP party president Manfred Weber. The extra time could give von der Leyen a breather to avoid humiliation in parliament. Freund added:
Von der Leyen is not a risk-taker. She won’t want to be taking the walk of shame out of Parliament.
