The European Parliament election is set to take place at the beginning of June next year, which makes it important to gauge what political direction the world’s largest single market may take.
Right-wing and far-right support has increased across the Atlantic for decades. They reject almost all non-European immigration, most if not all aspects of EU integration and liberal approaches to culture and society, especially if it comes to the queer community.
In 1999, far-right and right-wing parties comprised about 8% of the seats in the EU Parliament. In the 2019 election, that share had risen, notably after the intake of several new member states into the union, to about 22%.
National political parties in Europe group together into transnational European Parliament groups delineated by ideology to cooperate on legislative affairs. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) host most right-wing and far-right parties. A prominent leader of the ECR, which lists the US Republicans as its partner on their website, is Italy’s Prime Minister and European Council member Giorgia Meloni. Marine Le Pen’s far-right party in France and Germany’s AfD are core constituents of the ID group.
Polls, like the ones we would know for Canadian federal elections, do not exist on the EU level, mostly because sampling in more than 20 languages and calculating 27 different electoral systems is complex and expensive. Instead, polling aggregators – like POLITICO Europe or Europe Elects – collect polls from the national level and create EU-wide seat projections. Regular tracking that is not just ad-hoc during election campaigns is a “recent phenomenon,” which emerged around the 2014 election.
These projections have methodological shortcomings, for example, the underlying questions outside of campaigning periods refer to national parliamentary voting intention, rather than European Parliament election voting intention. This is relevant because voters are, for instance, more willing to vote for minor parties during the EU elections because they consider the latter secondary – i.e., less serious, a means to punish their unloved national leaders or just to electorally experiment. Simultaneously, this difference may be negligible because of the low seat number in most EU constituencies. The 2014 and 2019 elections showed that projections came close to the result and, thus, provide insight into the direction the continent is taking.
The current projections show that Europe is set to shift further to radical right parties. The ECR is projected to win about 83 seats if an election were held today, 17 more than it currently has. ID is set to increase from 62 seats to 69 seats. In addition, unaffiliated far-right and right-wing parties are set to increase from 22 seats to 36. About 27% of the EU Parliament seats would go to right-wing or far-right parties. If one counts the far-right and right-wing parties as one, it would make them the largest force on the continent. The centre-right EPP Group is set to win 23%, the centre-left S&D Group 20%, the liberal Renew Europe group 12%, the Left Group and the Greens/EFA would win about seven percent each.
Disclosure: Tobias Gerhard Schminke is the founder and head of Europe Elects.
Photo (via Flikr): CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2020 – Source: EP (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
