What’s happening in the EU parliamentary election? The biggest winners and losers in Europe

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Far-right parties made big gains during the European Parliament’s election, rattling the traditional powers and making French President Emmanuel Macron call snap legislative elections.

Millions of Europeans voted for candidates to serve five-year terms in a new European Parliament, the legislative branch of the 27-member trade bloc, in a vote that took place from June 6 to 9. Provisional results from the voting that ended Sunday showed the Christian Democrats would have 186 seats, up 10, the Social Democrats 135, down 4 and the liberal Renew Europe group 79, down 23.

Here’s a breakdown of what you need to know about the European election.

How does the European Union’s Parliamentary system work?

The European Parliament is the only EU institution to be elected by European citizens. It’s a real counterpower to the powerful EU’s executive arm, the European Commission.

The European Commission is the EU’s politically independent executive arm. It alone is responsible for drawing up proposals for new European legislation, and it implements the decisions of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.

Unlike the Commission, the Parliament does not propose legislation, but its powers are expanding. It now has the authority to pass legislation on a wide range of topics, voting on laws relating to climate, banking rules, agriculture, fisheries, security or justice. The legislature also votes on the EU budget, which is crucial to the implementation of European policies, including, for instance, aid delivered to Ukraine.

Lawmakers are also a key element of the check and balances system since they need to approve the nomination of all EU commissioners, who are the equivalent of ministers. It can also force the whole commission to resign with a vote of a two-third majority.

The number of members elected in each country depends on the size of the population. It ranges from six for Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus to 96 for Germany. In 2019, Europeans elected 751 lawmakers. Following the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU in 2020, the number of MEPs fell to 705, with some of the 73 seats previously held by British MEPs redistributed to other member states.

After the election, the European Parliament will have 15 additional members, bringing the total to 720. Twelve countries will get extra MEPs.

National political parties contest elections, but once they are elected, most of the lawmakers then join transnational political groups.

Who are the key party groups in the European Parliament?

European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)

The centre-right group is the largest in the European Parliament, dominated by German Christian Democrats, with a fair smattering of Poles and Romanians. The group has forged an alliance with the socialists and liberal Renew Europe for the past five years, dividing up senior posts and driving through policies such as the “Green Deal.” But it has become more skeptical towards the green push in the lead-up to the EU assembly election.

Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats

The centre-left group is the second-biggest in the European Parliament, with its largest bloc of MEPs from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Workers Party. It became the focus of the Qatargate cash-for-lobbying scandal in late 2022 after the arrest of some of its MEPs and staff. It says its priority is to fight unemployment and make societies fairer.

Renew Europe

The third group in the previous governing coalition is very much dominated by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, which is expected to be a distant second to Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National in the election. “We are unequivocally and unapologetically pro-European,” the liberal group says, stressing its support for EU democratic values.

Greens / European Free Alliance

The party dominated by Germany’s Greens can claim success in the past legislature with the EU Green Deal fight against climate change despite not being part of the three-group majority. Buoyed in 2019 by a multitude of school climate protests, they are forecast to lose seats this time around as voters see more clearly the cost of the green transition. The group says the next five years are crucial for the EU’s green economy transformation.

The Left

The Left, including MEPs from La France Insoumise, Spain’s Podemos Unida and Germany’s Die Linke, prioritizes workers’ rights and economic justice, equality for women and minorities. A new German leftist breakaway by former Die Linke co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht adds uncertainty this time around to the group’s prospects.

European Conservatives and Reformists

Once the home of Britain’s Conservative Party, the hard right ECR is dominated by members of Poland’s eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS), which battled with Brussels when in government until late 2023. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) are set to become a major player in the group after the election. Still hardline on migration and believing the EU has overreached, Meloni has shown greater willingness to co-operate with others in the EU, meaning the ECR could play a greater role in the new parliament.

Identity and Democracy

The furthest right group in parliament, with France’s Rassemblement National (RN), appeared set to be among the biggest winners in the election as voters frustrated over a cost of living and energy crisis and migration drift from mainstream parties.

However, the group expelled Alternative for Germany after the German party’s lead candidate, whose aide has been charged with spying for China, said that the Nazi’s Waffen SS were “not all criminals.”

The ID’s opponents have also charged them with serving Russian interests, with calls for the West to stop arming Ukraine.

The big take-aways from recent election results:

Winners:

Several conservative blocs increased their seat share:

• Provisional results indicated centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), will continue to be the biggest bloc of the 720-seat parliamentary chamber, after they grew their bloc’s tally by 10 additional members, for a total of 186.
• Two conservative blocs, the Identity and Democracy Group (ID) and the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) also increased their seat share by modest numbers. ID won nine more seats, bringing their total to 58, and ECR increased their tally by four, for a total of 73.

Losers:

Many left-wing groups saw their share shrink by a handful of seats each.

• The centre-left Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D,) also known as the Social Democrats, emerged as the largest liberal bloc, with 135 seats, four less than what they scored in the last election.
• The liberal Renew Europe Group took the biggest losses in the election, as their 102 seat-bloc was reduced to just 79 seats.
• The Greens lost 18 members, for a new total of 53 seats in the chamber.
• The ultra-liberal group The Left lost one seat, for a total of 36.

What does the EU election mean for national leaders such as France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz?

Macron calls snap election, dissolving French parliament

The snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday after his bruising loss to the far-right will be France’s most fateful legislative vote in decades, its finance minister said on Monday.

“This will be the most consequential parliamentary election for France and for the French in the history of the Fifth Republic,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told RTL radio, referring to Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 constitution, considered the starting point of modern French politics.

Mr. Macron’s shock decision amounts to a roll of the dice on his political future and that of France. It immediately sent the euro down, also hitting French stocks and government bonds.

The June 30 and July 7 ballot could, for the first time, hand a great deal of power to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, if they can transform their rising popularity into a win at home too. If National Rally did score a majority, Mr. Macron would remain president for three more years and continue to be in charge of defence and foreign policy. But he would lose the power to set the domestic agenda, ranging from economic policy to security and immigration.

The early election will also come shortly before the July 26 start of the Paris Olympics, when all eyes will be on France.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition suffers heavy losses

The leader of the EU’s richest and most powerful country, Germany, also suffered a blow. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular governing coalition lost badly to the conservative opposition, which benefited from his troubles.

All three parties in Germany’s ruling coalition suffered losses in the parliamentary elections:

• The Greens slumped the most, falling to 11.9 per cent, from 20.5 per cent in 2019
• Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats fell to 13.9 per cent, from 15.8 per cent
• Pro-business Free Democrats dropped to 5.2 per cent, from 5.4 per cent.

“No-one is well advised to simply go back to business as usual,” said Scholz said in a news conference in Berlin, adding that the gains far-right parties made are worrying and should not become normalized. “We have to worry about that. You can never get used to it, and it always has to be the task to push them back again,” he said.

The conservative bloc maintained its position as the strongest German party in Brussels as it looks ahead to a national election expected in the fall of next year. And the far-right Alternative for Germany party made good gains despite a string of scandals surrounding its top two candidates for the EU legislature.

The government has rejected calls for an early election and says the vote would take place as planned next year in the fall.

The rise of the far right in Europe

The European far right has now gone mainstream, confirming a trend that had been in place for some time. It is hard to say exactly when the trend picked up momentum, but 2016 would be a good guess, Globe columnist Eric Reguly wrote in a recent column. That was the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. election, each an indication of conservative nationalism and anti-globalism capturing the imagination of angry voters.

The propellants of that swing to the right have been in place for years: A backlash against immigration, especially of the undocumented variety; concerns about the rising costs of meeting net-zero emission goals; rising inflation and deindustrialization as Asian countries replace Europe as the manufacturing powerhouses; concern about sexuality and gender.

Collectively, the far-right parties won almost a quarter of the 720 seats in the European Parliament. While Ms. Le Pen’s victory was the most dazzling – her party won 30 of France’s 81 allotted seats – the far right also made gains in Spain, Austria, Hungary and Cyprus, as well as Germany and Italy.

What does this mean for climate, migration and foreign policy in Europe?

The rightward shift could have a bearing on a series of important policy areas in the next five-year term, such as climate change, migration, support for Ukraine and trade.

Climate change policies could suffer setback

A more rightward-leaning European Parliament could make it harder to pass ambitious EU climate policies, but the majority of Europe’s current world-leading green policies are likely to stay put. A full-scale reversal of the dozens of EU climate policies passed in the last five years would be legally difficult.

Those policies – which include renewable energy targets and a strengthened carbon pricing regime on power and industry – are fixed into EU law and already being rolled-out across the bloc’s 27 member states. Many are already working. EU emissions are down by nearly a third from 1990 levels, and Europe is installing wind and solar energy capacity at record speed.

Still, the election campaign saw mounting calls from the right to scrap some Green Deal policies – such as the EU’s 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel cars. That policy has a 2026 review clause, on which the Parliament will get a say.

The latest election results could have consequences for an upcoming 2040 EU climate target, needed to steer the EU towards its 2050 net zero emissions target. The EU Commission has suggested the 2040 goal should be an ambitious 90% emissions cut, but it needs approval from both EU countries and the Parliament.

Consensus around migration policy could become further skewed

The surge in support for far-right parties is likely to bolster calls for more barriers to immigration, seeing that the campaigns of many nationalist and euro-sceptic parties included clamp-downs on migration.

Migration and asylum policy has been a major topic of division within the EU over the past decade. About 1.3 million people, mainly refugees and asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East fleeing war and conflict, sought refuge in Europe in 2015. The EU’s asylum system collapsed, reception centres were overwhelmed in Greece and Italy, and countries further north built barriers to stop people entering.

In April, EU lawmakers approved a major revamp of the bloc’s migration laws, called The Pact on Migration and Asylum, which includes controversial measures. Few have admitted to being happy with the new policy response to one of Europe’s biggest political crises, and even the lawmakers who drafted parts of the new regulations are unwilling to support the entire reform package. It has also been slammed by migrant and human rights groups.

Foreign policy: Ukraine’s war and defense commitments could be affected

Foreign and defense policy are primarily the domain of the EU’s member countries, not the European Parliament. So the election result should not have any immediate impact on EU support for Ukraine or military matters.

However, the European Parliament will have a role to play in plans to encourage pan-European co-operation between countries and companies on defence projects and to get governments to buy more European military kit. The European Commission’s Defence Industrial Programme, which aims to realize those goals, needs the consent of both EU governments and the European Parliament.

Chamber could toughen its stance on foreign trade treaties

The European Parliament’s principle role in EU trade policy is in approving free trade agreements before they can enter force. It is not directly involved in trade defence, such as the imposition of tariffs.

The European Commission and some EU leaders argue that the bloc needs more trade agreements with reliable partners to make up for lost business with Russia and to reduce dependence on China.

What’s next for markets after far-right EU election surge triggers shock France vote?

A number of trade agreements are still waiting for approval, such as with Mexico and the South American bloc Mercosur, while the European Commission is also seeking to strike deals with the likes of Australia. All those deals, and the Mercosur agreement in particular, have faced opposition and pushing them through parliament could be even more difficult with greater numbers of nationalist eurosceptics.

With reports from Reuters, The Associated Press and Eric Reguly