Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.
Center-right and right-wing parties are set to take the largest number of seats in Sunday’s European Union election in the most populous nations: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland.
France led the rightward lurch with such a crushing victory for the right-wing National Rally that liberal President Emmanuel Macron dissolved France’s parliament and called an early election. Early projections suggested the National Rally would win 32 percent or more of the vote, more than twice that of the president’s party.
“The president of the Republic cannot remain deaf to the message sent this evening by the people of France,” National Rally’s President Jordan Bardella told his supporters at the Parc Floral in Paris.
In Germany, the center-right is cruising to a comfortable victory, with the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming second and beating Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Socialists into third place.
Voters across 27 nations have voted over the past week to select 720 members of the European Parliament, who will serve over the next five years. Their first main role with be to approve or reject the main candidate for Europe’s top job: president of the European Commission.
Collected together, the right parties would theoretically represent the second biggest bloc in the Parliament — being on track to come first in France and Italy, and second in Germany, the three biggest and most important countries in the 27-nation bloc.
The right-wing is also expected to win in Hungary, and tie for first in terms of European Parliament seats in the Netherlands. The center-right was comfortably first in Greece and Bulgaria.
The single most ominous warning signal for the future of the EU is France, given the scale of the right’s win over Macron. All eyes will now be on whether France’s populist wave can maintain its momentum through the impending parliamentary elections and on to presidential elections in 2027.
The official winner of the evening looks set to be European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whose center-right European People’s Party will still make up the single-biggest bloc in Parliament.
With early projections showing the EPP will secure about 181 out of the 720 seats in Parliament, the center right will be the dominant force but can hardly govern alone as it will be miles from an absolute majority in the chamber.
The main challenge for von der Leyen in the coming days and weeks will be whether she can strike a deal with the traditional centrist parties — the socialists and liberals — to build a majority of 361 or more in the Parliament.
“Today is a good day for [the] EPP. We won the European elections, my friends. We are the strongest party, we are the anchor of stability … Together with others we will build a bastion against the extremes from the left and from the right. We will stop them!”
Her supporters replied with chants of “Five more years.”
In all, the three big center groups look set to have about 400 seats. That means von der Leyen’s reapproval will go down to the wire, because she will be rejected if only about 10 percent of lawmakers from the main parties rebel against their party lines. The rebellion rate is normally higher.
This raises a big question of whether she will need to fish around for other allies, ranging from the Greens to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy.
