By Alberto Alemanno
Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law at HEC Paris and College of Europe, in Bruges and Natolin.
As the dust settles over the EU elections, it is worth taking a step back to fully grasp the democratic meaning of these elections – the 10th ever organized at the pan-EU level. Over the past week, approximately 50% of EU citizens took the time to vote in the EU elections, thus matching the record-high turn-out of the previous 2019 elections.
These 180 million eligible voters voted on different dates between June 6 and 9, for national – not European – political parties and for national – not European – candidates who ran on national – not European – programs.
So much for ‘European’ politics.
After over 70 years of unprecedented socio-economic integration, the Union lacks an EU-wide electoral competition capable of fostering a genuine transnational space of debate and dialogue – both within institutions and outside them – where citizens can understand, influence and participate in decision-making affecting their common interests as Europeans.
No surprise that, in the absence of a genuine EU political space, the results of the 2024 elections – which consist of 27 parallel national elections – offered a highly fragmented snapshot of domestic political situations instead. Having witnessed a decade of timid Europeanization of the political conversation – as pioneered by the pan-EU electoral offer of the European Greens and other transnational political parties, such as DiEM25 and Volt –, the 2024 EU elections proved to be first and foremost a national affair. France is just the latest, possibly the most compelling illustration of the high societal and political costs stemming from such an instrumental use of EU elections for domestic purposes.
Paradoxically, the 2024 EU elections might go down in history as shaping national politics more than the Union’s future direction.
Today’s national entrenchment of EU politics prevents – by design – these 27 parallel elections from delivering on their own declared mission: to enable citizens to express a clear set of political priorities for the Union, and to do that beyond the nation-state. Instead, they turn into a popularity contest over the governing political class, whose outcome has little to say about the Union’s future direction.
It does not have to be this way.
Several attempts have been made at Europeanizing the electoral competition and party system. While this is required by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, which timidly introduced a form of parlamentarization of the EU in which the political color of the Commission is defined by the electoral outcome of the Parliamentary elections, those efforts have largely failed. The latest EU Parliament’s proposal for a new EU Electoral Act would have conferred each voter two votes: one to elect MEPs in national constituencies, and one in an EU-wide constituency. Due to the EU governments’ disfavor, the proposal had not even made it to the table of the Council of the EU. Despite the small number of seats allocated transnationally (only 28), this reform would have been a game-changer towards the establishment of an embryonic EU-wide electoral competition. By requiring for the first time every single national party running in the EU elections to disclose its EU political affiliation to its electorate across the entire Union, it would have contributed to establish a link between citizen’s vote and the political color of the next EU Commission.
From such a perspective, the much-awaited surge of far-right political parties within the new EU Parliament celebrating an exclusive nationalist essentialism appears as a self-inflicted damage by mainstream parties.
By stopping the emergence of any and all forms of Europeanization of the EU political space, Europe’s political leaders are not only playing in favor of nationalist parties – which are an essentially domestic phenomenon – but also depriving themselves of the opportunity to let different visions of the EU emerge within and across their member countries.
This is holding the EU back at the time in which the transnational nature of most of the major recent events facing the Union, from Covid to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the Gaza war, require greater – not less – Europeanization of the political space.
If the dominant storyline has been the ‘surge of the far right,’ a counter-narrative has quickly emerged offering the more reassuring message that ‘the center is holding.’
Both happen to be true. With the historically grounded pro-EU majority maintaining 400 seats of the 720 European Parliament, the ‘far right’ won big only in Europe’s two largest countries, France and Germany.
Yet for that to make sense of it, i.e. to translate this emerging political power into a permanent and reliable parliamentary majority within the new EU Parliament, might prove a difficult endeavor.
The question remains whether, and the extent to which, the pro-EU majority grouping will need further support to pass legislation, either from the left (such as from the downsized Greens) or the right, from Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and potentially other ‘far-right’, anti-establishment parties to the right of the European People’s Party.
The latter parties may be in government – directly or indirectly – in one-third of EU member states, including founding states such as Italy and the Netherlands, where they have gained unprecedented respectability, but the same normalization has not yet occurred at the EU level.
It is against this backdrop that the choice of the next EU Commission President will play out. That individual will be called upon to shape a parliamentary majority that might be even less permanent than usual throughout the five-year cycle. Instead, we can expect the emergence of a flexible balance of power, shifting to the left or the right depending on the issue at hand, that is the policy proposals coming from the EU Commission. Ultimately, if approximately 25% of the new Parliament consists of anti-establishment, largely unaffiliated parties, mostly connected to the far right, even if they joined together, they would still not be able to make, only block proposals.
From such a perspective, it’s not only, to take a major example, the EU climate ambitions that risk being set aside, but, more broadly, the EU traditionally integrationist agenda appears to be at stake too.
Economic support to Ukraine could be paused, the enlargement of the Union might be slowed down, or even frozen, under the far-right influence. The next long-term budget, due to be negotiated by the parliament in 2026, is also set to shrink. This may create a dangerous gap between citizens’ expectations of the EU’s ability to address big challenges and the means it has to do so.
This can in turn damage the EU’s credibility and benefit the new far-right political class among their nationalistic, Europhobic and xenophobic constituencies. From this perspective, these results look likely to accelerate the shift to the right that has already been taking place within and across the EU, by internalizing and inevitably normalizing these forces into the day-to-day decision-making.
The 2024 EU elections could indeed mark the beginning of an unparalleled and regressive transformation of what may realistically be expected from the EU project.
The hope is that the 2029 EU elections may be organized in a more transnational way, with truly European political parties, that could determine their own coalitions before – not after – the election. Without such a Europeanization of its political system, the EU may seriously struggle to pursue its own path in line with citizens’ expectations.
