EU, von der Leyen tries everything to find votes. Judgement day is approaching –

Next Thursday, Ursula von der Leyen, if she manages to secure at least 361 votes, will be re-elected President of the European Commission until 2029. This week she has been at the European Parliament in Brussels every day to meet MEPs ahead of the vote that will take place at 1 pm, in the plenary session in Strasbourg. If she is not re-elected, an eventuality that seems remote but not impossible (“even car accidents happen”, as a parliamentary source observes), the European Council will have to identify a new candidate within a month. The first plenary session of the tenth legislature will open next Tuesday at 10 am (in the meantime, in Brussels, the Eurogroup will meet on Monday, followed by Ecofin the next day) and, first of all, will elect the President of the Parliament: Roberta Metsola is the only candidate. There is time until 7pm on Monday for potential challengers to come forward, but Maltese politics is receiving praise from both the right and the left, from the League to the Five Star Movement to remain in Italy, and appears destined for reappointment. After the election of the president, MEPs will elect the Bureau, i.e. the 14 vice-presidents and the 5 quaestors, an operation that will take up the rest of Tuesday and perhaps even part of Wednesday morning. On Wednesday at 5pm the European Parliament will vote on the number of members of the committees and interparliamentary delegations; a motion on the war in Ukraine is also expected. The list of MEPs to be appointed as members of each committee, based on the decisions of the groups, will be announced on Friday morning. The committees will meet to elect their respective presidents and vice-presidents the following week, in Brussels.

On Thursday morning, from 9 am, the incumbent president, re-nominated, von der Leyen will present the guidelines for the work of the Commission in the tenth legislature. A debate will follow, following which there will be a break and the groups will meet to decide how to vote. The vote, by secret ballot, on the re-election of von der Leyen will take place approximately from 1 pm to 3 pm. This week, the president of the Commission met the political groups: first the EPP, then the Socialists and Democrats, followed by Renew Europe and finally the Greens/EFA. As the co-president of the Greens Bas Eickhout said, the order in which von der Leyen saw the groups “already indicates something” of her intentions. Next Monday, in Strasbourg, she will meet the Left group in the followingnoon, while on Tuesday morning she will meet the Conservatives, at their request, as confirmed by the co-president Nicola Procaccini. The priority of the re-nominated president is to consolidate the consensus within her majority as much as possible, minimizing the number of snipers, historically high in Strasbourg. The Greens, according to what co-presidents Bas Eickhout and Terry Reintke said, seem inclined to vote in favor of von der Leyen, even if the group will decide only next Thursday, following reading the guidelines and listening to von der Leyen in the Chamber. Among the Liberals, the opposition of the Irish delegation, quite large (there are 6), was recorded, due to the clearly pro-Israel positions that von der Leyen has taken on the war in Gaza (the Irish, for historical reasons, have strong ties with the Palestinian people).

Even if it is not said openly, the 24 votes of Fratelli d’Italia would be very useful to von der Leyen, to guarantee her re-election, even if the probable favorable vote of the Greens makes them less indispensable (however, even among the ecologists there are delegations that do not like von der Leyen much, like the French one). In the majority, the issue is looked at in a secular way: since snipers will not be lacking, it goes without saying that the re-nominated president needs the votes of Fdi and that she seeks them, perhaps by leveraging the Italian commissioner (Rome wants a vice-presidency and a weighty portfolio, possibly economic). Von der Leyen’s dialogue with the ECR is objectively facilitated by the birth of two groups to the right of the Conservatives: the Patriots, the third group in the Chamber with 84 MEPs, which includes the Rassemblement National, the League, Fidesz, Chega, the FPOE and others, and the far right of the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), grouped around the AfD and the Poles of Konfederacija. The new group might organize a press conference to introduce itself in Strasbourg. The ‘tripartite’ right means that today the ECR is ‘the left’ of the right, the Patriots the center of the right and the ESN the right of the right. Bas Eickhout himself, a Dutch Green who certainly does not sympathize with the Conservatives, recalled yesterday that the ECR has always had a different treatment compared to Identity and Democracy, which has been kept out of the committee presidencies and vice-presidencies of the Chamber with the ‘sanitary cordon’, which the ECR considers “a democratic abomination”, as Procaccini recalled. A cordon that the ECR has already broken in the last legislature, electing as president of the Budget Committee the Belgian of the Flemish N-Va Johan van Overtveldt, former Minister of Finance, a competent person and therefore votable by the other parties. In short, if von der Leyen were voted for by a part of the Conservatives on Thursday, it would objectively be less easy, with two groups to their right, to cry scandal.