Why This EU Election Could Be a Referendum on Europe’s Future

This week, from June 6 to June 9, around 375 million European Union residents will vote in elections that will decide the 720 members of the next European Parliament. The legislative body will have responsibility for passing any proposed laws for the continent as well as approving the composition of the next European Commission, which drafts those laws and manages the bloc.

Are Europe’s conservatives planning to ally with the far right? Why have climate change and migration become the continent’s dominant issues? And is the European Parliament the world’s least powerful legislative body?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: It seems like Europe’s center right has moved further to the right in recent years, and may even be preparing to ally with far right parties rather than with greens and liberals. What could that portend for the next EU Parliament?

Adam Tooze: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s tactical tacking back and forth reflects the fact that, in the upcoming elections, all the polling suggests that key members of her current coalition, notably the greens, are likely to suffer very serious setbacks. And on the other hand, the strong parties emerging in Italy, in France, and in Germany as well may very well be the far right. The far right has always had a stronger presence in the European Parliament.

In general, the fringes of European politics have had a strong presence in the European Parliament because the elections of the European Parliament are, generally speaking, an occasion for Europeans to let off political steam. It’s an occasion for so-called protest voting. And the participation is nontrivial. It’s about 50 percent in 2019, which is less than recent U.S. presidential elections but more than U.S. midterm congressional elections. So these are significant political referenda.

In them, however, because it tends to be the more engaged citizens that vote, the fringes that attract the more committed partizans tend to do better. So it’s long been the case that the far right has strong representation in the European Parliament. And it’s going to get even stronger this year. There’s a big incumbency effect as well, because it’s one thing to tactically maneuver around Marine Le Pen, who’s in kind of permanent opposition in France as all the other parties in France maneuver to ensure she doesn’t become president, and they may not succeed the next time round. But Giorgia Meloni did become prime minister in Italy and has proven to be a relatively compromising figure in that role. And so von der Leyen has opened herself, to the shock of many members of her coalition, to that alliance.

There’s an open question, I think, as to how that’s going to work out. Because there is a candidate in the wings to replace her as the president of the commission, and that’s Mario Draghi—the centrist former central banker, former prime minister of Italy—who would be acceptable to the Italians. And so he would get Meloni’s vote, even if he’s a centrist—probably actually somewhere to the left of von der Leyen. So he’s a real risk for her.

But in any case, regardless of this maneuvering, it’s very clear that the green-centered agenda of 2019 has just been displaced in the current electoral cycle—in the thinking of the commission, and in the thinking of European politics generally—by the priority of defense and migration as key issues. And so, yes, there is a drift on those issues to the right, across the spectrum, regardless of what happens.

But it’s in this sense, in the way that we’re talking about this now, that the European Parliament really does reflect a pan-European politics of a kind. It has parties, it has agendas, and it has personalities who are quite well known. And there is very serious maneuvering going on both at the Brussels level and between national governments.

CA: The issues that are foregrounded on both sides of the campaign, across the parties, are climate change and and migration. What kind of link is there between these two issues, and does it go beyond the seeming empirical causal relationship? Obviously, climate change can cause migration, but I’m wondering if there’s a kind of deeper link.

AT: Yeah, I think the smartest diagnosis—if listeners want to read up ahead of the elections—of the underlying groundswell of opinion in Europe right now is the polling done by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which I’m attached to as a board member. And they did this remarkable stuff on crisis tribes. They took the idea of polycrisis and said, well, you know, everyone sees the world in different ways. And so the European constituencies can be broken down, they argued, into five separate groups of worries, if you like. They could all see the whole picture. But certain people prioritize migration, the economy, health, security, and the climate as key issues.

And what’s really striking is that for both migration and the climate, the two that you picked out, among the partizans of those two issues, the saliency of those issues is just predominant. So people who care about migration care about it even more and to a greater degree than those people who care about the economy, for instance. So, yes, it’s not surprising, I think, that you see electoral tacticians trying to appeal to those two causes.

I really like the idea that you’ve invoked there of this as a kind of referendum on the future of Europe in a really quite fundamental sense. It does have a little bit of that feeling right now, and maybe it’s because I parachuted into Europe for the summer, but I’m quite struck by it. And of course, one’s familiar with that sort of existential sense of peril in the United States right now. But in the United States, it’s very much centered on the republic—on U.S. democracy. Whereas I think in Europe, there’s this more general sense of really quite serious concern.

I mean, it’s not for nothing that French President Emmanuel Macron gave his second great speech at Sorbonne a couple of weeks ago, and he began it with this extraordinary phrase, “Europe is mortal.” You know, our Europe is mortal. It could die. And I mean, he is generally considered to be the radical centrist to end all radical centrists. And that’s how he chose to dramatize Europe’s situation. It’s a little over the top, but it captures, I think, that sense that you’re trying to get at, of rather grand stakes.

CA: Various kinds of corruption scandals have recently erupted around the European Parliament involving allegations of bribes coming from Qatar, Russia, and China. Is that itself a reflection of the parliament’s relative lack of importance and power? Is there a kind of associated lack of prestige with the European Parliament that has sort of fed these corruption problems?

AT: Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a Eurotrash element to the European Parliament and its business. I think it’s definitely more like the U.S. House of Representatives than it is the Senate. There are quite a lot of antics that go on and colorful characters and, indeed, a certain amount of rather blatant corruption. And it does have this Eurotrash kind of feel to it. Porn stars have campaigned to be in the parliament. You know, it’s a show.

But you have got to ask yourself why they would bother. And they bother because it is, in fact, a body worth influencing. Qatar was quite worried about the possibility of European parliamentary sanctions ahead of hosting the World Cup and wanted to stifle those. The Russians just want to cause a mess, and they realize that these elections are a sensitive place in which to cause a mess. The Chinese—ditto, I think. There are big struggles that go on in the European Parliament over value statements, if you like, and members of the European Parliament have been sanctioned by China as a result, which, for instance, blew up the last great act of Sino-European diplomacy, which was the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. That agreement was never ratified in Europe because members of the European Parliament are under sanction from the Chinese regime.

So I take your point about it being a little bit of a carnival. It has this carnivalesque quality, but we really shouldn’t underestimate its power. It’s an extremely powerful negative voice. It can dismiss a European Commission. It can veto any new president of the commission. It can veto any European legislation. It can launch investigations and inquiries. There have been several moments in recent years where it’s really been touch and go as to whether it would get majorities for important legislation. And an awful lot of haggling goes on back and forth to secure those majorities in due course. The migration legislation, for instance, has taken years to actually find the majorities needed to pass. It’s difficult to get ratification of trade treaties, both at the European level and the national level. It’s a serious check in a complex system of checks and balances that has to be taken seriously.

And it’s certainly not a rubber stamp. Russia has a rubber-stamp parliament. That’s really a body that doesn’t matter. And the European Parliament is not that kind of an entity. And the fact that it attracts the attention that it does now—and that we’re doing this show about it—is, I think, indicative in itself of the way in which it’s come somewhat more to the fore than anyone anticipated.