Every five years, mainstream pundits and politicians raise alarms about an invasion of populists and radicals in the European Union’s largest legislative body, the European Parliament. This June, the latest iteration of warnings about a far-right takeover of parliament is set to reach a new crescendo as citizens across are poised to deliver a potential upset as multiple cost-of-living crises rock the continent. Polls show the anti-immigrant, anti-green, and euro-skeptic Identity & Democracy winning the third most seats. While the “super grand coalition” of the three centrist groups will most likely retain its majority in parliament, almost half of the seats will be held by anti-European populists who make racism and authoritarianism the centerpiece of their political identity. Establishment leaders are sounding the alarm. French President Emmanuel Macron, a de-facto leader of the liberal bloc, recently argued that his group needs to issue “a wake-up call for our troops; we need to mobilize a lot more.”
European Parliament elections did not used to feel this consequential. For most of the body’s history, elections to parliament were a near-negligible event in the European political calendar. Far from seeing parliamentary elections as an opportunity to advance an insurgent political project, voters mostly used elections to voice discontent with their national governments. Turnout had constantly fallen in every EU election from 1979 until 2014 when it reached a low of 42.61%. The political makeup of parliamentary blocs reflected voters’ indifference. Unlike the U.S. congressional system, representatives stand for an election proportional representation scheme that favors party lists.
Whereas the U.S. divides itself into a binary decision between Republicans and Democrats, voters in the EU elect some 200 single-issue “Europarties,” which then group themselves into six or seven blocs. While this explanation of the electoral landscape of European parliamentary politics may at first glance seem conducive to healthy debate, the legislature, in practice, lacks enough commonalities between parties to unite under anything more than the vaguest political projects. Ties between deputies rarely extend beyond national delegations.
Take, for instance, Renew Europe (RE), a kingmaker since 2019 and Parliament’s third largest party. A brainchild of French President Emmanual Macron’s La République En Marche!, RE was formed so parties with the “liberal” in their names could campaign without any association with the classification as it became increasingly unpopular in Western Europe. In practice, the coalition disagrees on a number of big issues. While the bloc is nominally for a more federalist, unified European Union, many from the group’s northern delegations oppose French-led initiatives like building a European defense system, tackling climate change through state investment, and more aggressive budgeting. This internal paralysis between a free-trade North and a more federal South renders little appetite for imaginative political messaging — during a leadership crisis in 2021, Renew declared the problem solved after its members internally agreed to run on a platform of “upholding the rule of law” in the next elections.
Out of these listless voting blocks came a steady pattern of grand coalitions along German lines, bringing together center-right and center-left blocs, where the dominant political strategy was often simply perpetuating and gradually expanding EU control over the member states. As the political scientist Perry Anderson put it in his essay “Rivets of Unity,” “No division between government and opposition can emerge, because there is no government to be formed or opposed.” The point of the European Parliament is to push papers.
There is barely a desire among representatives to be present for policymaking. Average legislative attendance to the European Parliament sits at 45%. Nor do legislators prioritize being accountable to the public. As historian Christopher Bickerton notes: “Between 2009 and 2013, 81 percent of proposals were passed at first reading via the trilogue method — an informal, closed-doors, meeting between representatives from Parliament and EU leaders. Only 3 percent ever reached the third reading, which is where texts are debated in public plenary sessions of the Parliament.”
In contrast to the current alchemy of centrist parties, the potential incursion of far-right groups into parliament after June’s election is treated as an existential threat to the parliament’s unity by many mainstream figures. Yet, consternation over a far-right “takeover” of the European Parliament misses a fundamental, even more chilling reality, about the legislative body: the European Parliament is an effectively ceremonial entity. Far from providing a lever for a right-wing intrusion into the heart of the EU, the European Parliament has inadvertently ceded any control it could have had in the European system, lapsing into the governing component of least consequence.
Whereas most national legislative bodies can write and pass legislation, the European Parliament’s duties fall exclusively in the latter category. While some channels exist for parliamentary representatives to communicate their policy preferences, what parliament votes on is almost entirely determined by a 33,000-strong bureaucratic system, the European Commission, governed by a monolithic 90,000-page rulebook. European heads of state dictate general political directions and priorities in lockstep with the commission; parliament is functionally a rubber stamp – the last body to kick a policy down the road to adoption. Since its founding in 1952, Parliament has also acquired an impenetrable bureaucratic structure of its own, with over 7,000 career politicians serving some 700 elected delegates. The functionaries who service the European Commission are almost all disciples of the same centrist body that has governed Parliament since its founding. Right-wing legislators will find it difficult to navigate the Parliament’s labyrinthine structure without relying on these centrist-aligned bureaucrats.
Parliament’s two other legislative powers hardly inspire overtures about the democratic process. Parliament can reject, but not amend, budgets proposed by the Commission and reject, but not elect, commissioners chosen by the president of the Commission. Regarding the European Commission’s disproportionate power over Parliament, legal theorist Joseph H. H. Weiler lays out plainly why far-right figures in parliament will find this process hard to disrupt: “[The Commission] inserts itself into the most routine operations of the EU, turning into Europe’s constitutional operating system … axiomatic, beyond discussion, above debate, like the rules of democratic discourse, or even the very rules of rationality themselves, which seem to condition debate but not be part of it.” This almost helpless circumstance leaves any delegate looking to create change, including the far-right, in an onerous position, hamstrung by an inability to, as Anderson puts it, “aggregate nor channel the wishes of voters.”
My intention in writing about the challenge of making change through the European parliament is not to dismiss or downplay the threat of right-wing parties. With time and favorable national election results, the far right could push the EU in a decidedly more anti-immigrant and isolationist direction. The far right has already scored several victories over establishment parties this year. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for example, routinely uses his authority to block deals on Ukraine and Russia supported by the rest of the bloc. But if right-wing parties eventually transform the EU, it will not be because the European Parliament dramatically augmented their rise. A right-wing incursion may be able to shock Parliament’s culture of stasis, but it will find it hard to overcome an entrenched politics of habit and governing structure that defers to the Commission and Council.
More than anything, a far-right legislature will highlight how the European Parliament acts as a bulwark against all change, fascist or revolutionary. Regardless of whether autocrats win big in June, Parliament is long past due for a reckoning with its undemocratic proclivities.
