EU Parliament Shifting Rightward
Plus: which party benefits from high voter turnout and "democracy" v "economy" as a 2024 election issue
Hello from Mexico. I’ve been on the road for speaking events in the past few weeks. Here are three developments that have attracted my attention recently:
1) EU Parliament Set to Shift Rightward in 2024
The EU’s legislative branch is a curious hybrid of two bodies. One, the Council of the European Union, consists simply of representatives from EU governments. (Imagine that the US Congress had another body consisting of delegates from all of the 50 state governments.) The other, more familiar to Americans, is the EU Parliament, whose members are elected popularly by all EU citizens every five years.
This EU Parliament (which meets both in Strasbourg and in Brussels) is no mere cog in the grinding Eurocracy. It is a linchpin of the entire European Union system. No EU executive (the President of the EU Commission) can take office without the EU Parliament’s approval. The EU Parliament can force the current President to resign. The EU Parliament can amend or reject any of the Commission’s new policy initiatives. What’s more, political leaders in every member nation hold their breath whenever the EU Parliament conducts a new election—since it’s often a wake-up call for exhausted national coalitions (like the current German Ampelkoalition, headed by Olaf Scholz) that no longer enjoy public support.
Well, guess what? The last EU-wide election was in 2019. The next will be held less than four months from now, in June 2024. And, according to a new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, this upcoming election will likely push the EU Parliament into “a sharp right turn.” The council bases its forecast on a detailed model that looks at historical voting patterns in each country in light of the most recent polling trends.