Thewesternbalkans
More than 360 million European citizens had the right to vote in this 6-9 June 2024 European Parliament elections. Across Europe, the overall turnout was around 51%.
This elections are extremely important not only for the European Union member states, but also for the candidate countries including those of the Western Balkans.
There is an opportunity that EU enlargement has the chance to become the most important component of EU foreign policy in the next cycle.
While radical-right parties remain sceptical towards enlargement, some support particular EU candidate countries for their very own reasons.
Poland’s PiS considers Ukraine’s accession a matter of national security; Romania’s AUR looks at Moldova as part of Romanian territory; and Hungary’s Fidesz hopes like-minded Western Balkan countries would up Budapest’s own position inside the bloc. It will be one of the big challenges for the next EU institutional cycle to address the overall trend.
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First results
First results from the European Parliament elections show that voters across Europe have shown a preference for parties on the right to the far-right of the political spectrum, while Socialists, Greens, Liberals, and the far-left have overall lost seats.
The European People’s Party (EPP) group scored 184 seats, maintaining its position as the leading force in the European Parliament. The centre-right has gained 9 more MEPs than it had previously.
The European Socialists (S&D) came second with an expected 139 seats.
The liberal Renew Europe group is still third, but is down from 102 seats to 80. They previously risked losing their position as the third political force, as hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group and far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) were projected to surge.
Renew’s losses can partly be attributed to the lose of Spain’s liberal party Ciudadanos, and the deep weakening of French President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition which lost ten seats from 2019, down to 13.
On the right flank of the hemicycle, voters have awarded four additional seats to the ECR, taking them from 69 to 73 MEPs. ID has scored 58 seats compared to their previous 49.
However, 53 and 45 seats fall under the category of “others” and “non-affiliated,” respectively, bringing together all new parties which have not yet officially declared their group affiliation. Many of these are considered to be far-right, and likely to join one of the two groups.
Among this assortment of parties are Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Slovakia’s Republika, Romania’s AUR, Spain’s far-right newcomer SALF, and Bulgaria’s Vazrazhdane.
As Hungarian Prime Minister and France’s far-right opposition leader Marine Le Pen call for a right-wing unification, it is still unclear how ID, ECR, and the non-affiliated parties will reshuffle, so a new right-wing group may emerge, taking the third or even second place.
From holding fourth place in the last term with 71 seats, the Greens have plummeted to 52 seats, now in sixth position. Their losses can be attributed to a weakening grip on their traditional strongholds: Germany, Austria, and France.
Despite ample wins in the north of the EU, Italy, and Belgium, The Left group has scored 36 seats, two less than the previous term, and now remain the last political force.
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Results in some European countries
France. The Rassemblement national (RN) won 32.4% of the vote, while Macron’s Besoin d’Europe list secured 15.2% of the vote share.
Such results, anticipated by polls over months of campaigning, prompted Macron to take the boldest political move at his disposal on Sunday (9 June): dissolve the assembly and call snap elections in the beginning of July.
Italy. Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party won a decisive victory in European elections in Italy, early results showed Monday (10 June) — making her one of the few EU leaders to emerge stronger after the vote.
Her post-fascist Brothers of Italy party had secured more than 28% of the vote — surpassing the 26% she secured in September 2022 national elections.
Before the elections, there was much speculation about her position as a potential kingmaker in the next European majority, as she was approached by both Ursula von der Leyen and Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally.
Germany. Despite a series of recent scandals, Germany’s far-right AfD party managed to post the best national result in the party’s history in the European elections, surpassing even the SPD of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Projections before midnight saw the party in second place, behind the victorious centre-right CDU/CSU (30.2%), with its highest-ever national election result (15.9%) and ahead of the centre-left government parties.
The AfD managed to become the strongest political force in former East Germany and came joint first, alongside the CDU/CSU, with young voters aged 16-24.
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which has managed to become the largest political force in the Central European country, is pushing its European political family, the Identity and Democracy (ID), to admit Germany’s scandal-ridden AfD back into its ranks.
The ID group in the European Parliament expelled the AfD last month, amid growing fears among Marine le Pen’s Rassemblement National and other national delegations that the AfD’s extremist views could alienate parts of their voter base.
The Austrian FPÖ, which is about to double its seats in the European Parliament, however, has other plans.
Harald Vilimsky, who led the FPÖ into the election, stressed that he would meet with Le Pen next Wednesday to strategise about how to expand the number of MEPs of the ID group, which is currently expected to get 58 lawmakers, to a three-digit number.
High-ranking AfD politicians have already stated that they would like to rejoin the ID group.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party emerged strongest in Sunday’s EU elections. With nearly 90% of the votes counted, Fidesz came out on top at 44%, but well down from the 52% it won in the last EU elections in 2019.
Largest member states lead far-right swing.
With the AfD projected to take 16 seats in the EU Parliament, it is notably also a key driver of a wider far-right shift in Europe.
Right-wing groups ECR and ID, and the AfD and Fidesz as non-affiliated parties, were projected to take around a quarter of seats in the new Parliament. Almost 50% of those seats came down to parties from the largest member states alone – that is, France, Italy, and Germany – including the AfD.
3. A week of summitry-distribution of top jobs in the EU
Before EU leaders convene over dinner on 17 June for an informal EU summit in Brussels, they will have plenty of opportunities to informally map out the mood among their counterparts.
A first stop was the B9 Summit in Latvia on Tuesday (11 June), where leaders of Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia primarily meet for Eastern flank security talks, but also they informally touched upon EU top job talks.
The big show of the week will come at the G7 summit in Italy later this week, where Michel will have the first opportunity to take the temperature of the EU’s big three – France, Germany, and Italy.
Some EU leaders have already thrown their support behind incumbent European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, others keep her guessing.
