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Von der Leyen needs 361 votes to keep her job.
Good luck with that.
We do the math on whether the European Commission
president can get a second term. It will go down to the wire.
JUNE 3,
2024 4:01 AM CET
BY NICHOLAS
VINOCUR
BRUSSELS —
In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen only secured her job as European Commission
president by a razor-thin majority in the the European Parliament: nine votes.
This year,
the numbers game required to secure a second term from a potentially way more
hostile European Parliament after the June 6-9 EU election looks even tougher.
There is a very real chance the German conservative just won’t get the votes.
In order to
win another stint running the EU from the 13th floor of the commission’s
Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels, von der Leyen needs to overcome two major
political hurdles.
First, she
needs to win support from a qualified majority of the 27 EU leaders around the
European Council table during a post-election meeting in late June. Second, she
must secure at least 361 votes from 720 Members of European Parliament to
confirm the leaders’ choice during a subsequent, secret vote in Parliament.
Things are
easier on the Council front. Von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s
Party (EPP) has 12 EU heads of state and government on its books, all of whom
can be expected to rally behind her. There’s always a danger things could go
wrong: France’s Emmanuel Macron could plump for another candidate, and
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz hails from the socialist camp. For now,
however, the national leaders aren’t giving her a splitting political migraine:
That’s the Parliament.
The polls
suggest von der Leyen’s EPP will be the biggest single group in Parliament
after the election, with 170 seats. To build a majority, she will then need to
offer goodies to the other big centrist groups — the socialists and liberals —
in post-electoral horse trading. The deals will hinge on which countries get
top jobs in Brussels — think trade and economy roles in the commission — and
which political parties will get leading roles on Parliament committees.
Even then,
however, we need to get our calculators out and crunch through how the numbers
stack up. You can wager von der Leyen will be doing just that.
Do the math
If she
manages to secure support from the EPP, the liberal Renew Europe group and the
Socialists and Democrats, that would amount to some 390 seats, according to
projections from POLITICO’s poll of polls.
That would
put her over the 361-threshold, but it’s not that simple. Experts and political
insiders warn that even if party leaders order them to back von der Leyen, it’s
likely that something over 10 percent of the lawmakers in each of these groups
will either oppose her or abstain on the big day.
A 10
percent attrition rate would bring von der Leyen’s total down to 351, 10 short
of the critical number. And that’s a generous estimate: According to the
political insiders POLITICO spoke to for this article, the rebellion rate will
almost certainly run higher than 10 percent, even inside von der Leyen’s own
EPP. In previous votes, the rebels bucking the party line have been between 13
percent and 28 percent.
Back in
2019, von der Leyen won her nine-vote majority thanks to the support of the
EPP, Renew and S&D. She also bagged a number of votes from Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and Poland’s conservative Law and Justice
(PiS) party. There’s no way she will get those two camps this time round. She
has pushed PiS and Fidesz hard on their rule-of-law failings and her
administration has cast them as the bloc’s bêtes noires.
When it
comes to the socialists and liberals, a growing number of their MEPs might
shoot down von der Leyen this year because they are concerned she is willing to
consider an alliance with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. They
also accuse her of watering down the EU’s green agenda.
Additionally,
there are bright red danger signs that the number of rebels within her own EPP
ranks could be strangely high. France’s Les Républicains — expected to have six
MEPs — do not back her, and EPP insiders fear shaky support among their
Italian, Spanish and Slovenian delegations. Ominously, at the EPP’s congress to
nominate her in Bucharest in March, 18 percent of the 499 delegates who cast a
vote said “no” to von der Leyen.
Acknowledging
this concern about getting full support from EPP rank-and-file in a secret
vote, a senior EPP insider said on condition of anonymity that the boss needed
to go on a lobbying drive to Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in Poland and
Spain’s Partido Popular.
“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,” the EPP
insider said.
In the
French dissenting camp of the EPP, François Xavier Bellamy, a member of Les
Républicains, said that if the president of the European Commission is not
reelected “it will be thanks to the fight we’ve led which put her in the
minority in her own party.”
Bellamy
only represents a small number of lawmakers, but his suggestion that other
national delegations may also oppose von der Leyen — coupled with
less-than-overwhelming support for her during the nomination conference in
Bucharest in March — hints at the risk of a considerable shortfall.
The Meloni factor
Von der
Leyen has been assiduously courting Italian Prime Minister Meloni, whose
support she will need both at the Council table and in Parliament, but it looks
like a strategy that could well backfire. The closer she gets to Meloni’s
European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the more votes she will hemorrhage
from the socialists and liberals.
Meloni’s
support will be crucial to her nomination in Council but her value is less
obvious in the Parliament where her Brothers of Italy party is only on course
to pick up about 10 seats — far less than the combined force of Fidesz and Law
and Justice.
Those 10
votes would almost certainly be outweighed by the loss of votes from the
Socialists, many of whom, particularly in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party in
Germany, would turn against von der Leyen for her dalliance with Meloni.
The
Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew and Greens have said they will not
support von der Leyen’s reelection if she makes any kind of a deal with
Meloni’s hard-right allies in Parliament. That may or may not be an idle threat
— the terms of such a deal may not be made public, and the vote is secret — but
it still raises concerns about the level of support in Parliament.
If von der
Leyen abandons hope of receiving support from the ECR, she would need backing
not just from Renew and S&D, but also the Greens, to make up for the
shortfall. With the Greens in the mix, von der Leyen’s projected base of
support would be 432 votes — more than enough to pass the threshold even taking
into account a considerable attrition rate.
But nothing
is less predictable than what kind of support she can expect from the Greens,
who did not support von der Leyen in any systemic way back in 2019. Speaking to
POLITICO, German Greens lawmaker Daniel Freund pointed out the Greens had
worked closely with von der Leyen throughout her term in power and could yet
offer support for her reelection, though such support would come in exchange
for a “list of demands.”
“The
question is: What do we get if we make a deal to work with her?” he asked. “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,” he added.
Yet those
very commitments for the Greens could prove toxic for von der Leyen’s support
among conservatives, who have specifically rebelled against key aspects of
Green Deal in the last year of her mandate, namely the phaseout of the
combustion engine and a nature restoration law.
Adding to
the uncertainty, von der Leyen is likely to have to make any such deals in a
mad-dash of negotiation following the late-June meetings of the European
Council. Several political groups are pushing to hold the confirmation for the
next Commission president in July, during the last plenary session before the
summer recess — which leaves her an extremely narrow window in which to
construct a possibly highly complex coalition deal between Renew, S&D, the
EPP and the Greens.
While other
factions have pressed for the deal to be done in July, Freund indicated
openness to extending the timeframe until September — something EPP party
president Manfred Weber has also been pushing for. More time might buy von der
Leyen some breathing room to avoid a humiliation in Parliament.
“Von der
Leyen is not a risk-taker,” Freund added. “She won’t want to be taking the walk
of shame out of Parliament.”
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