President Emmanuel Macron called for shock early elections in France after hundreds of millions of Europeans voted to elect 720 members of the European Parliament and support for the far right grew.
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With the final count of the European Parliament elections underway, it’s clear who the winners and losers are among the EU’s 27 member states.
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni solidified his role as a key power in Brussels with an estimated 28% of the vote, while French President Emmanuel Macron’s election results were so poor that he was forced to dissolve parliament and call a snap election.
Winner:
France’s far-right National Rally won, dealing a bitter defeat to President Macron. The right-wing European People’s Party (EPP) retained its position as the largest party in Parliament, upping its 2019 lead by 13 seats. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni secured his role as kingmaker in the elections.
loser:
The Austrian and German Green parties fared significantly worse than expected: the liberal “Renew” group lost 20 seats across member states compared to 2019. Germany’s Social Democrats: Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party came in second to the European People’s Party, alongside the far-right AfD.
First quote
Initial estimates of the election results released by the European Parliament suggested the Greens and the liberal Renew party would lose around 20 MEPs each, eroding the pro-European majority they need to support top European officials and uphold EU law.
The projections, released just after midnight and made after all polls had finished, showed the Greens would fall to 53 seats in 2024, down from 72 in March.
Statistics show that the number of seats held by President Macron’s Renewable party has fallen from 102 to 83. This prompted President Macron to take the unexpected step of dissolving the National Assembly.
Support for Mr Macron’s pro-business liberals has fallen sharply while support for parties considered politically more radical has risen, although some of them are not yet assigned to political groups in the European Parliament.
In France, the far-right Rally National (RN) party is projected to have won a staggering 31.5% of the vote, more than double the number of votes received by Macron.
“France needs a clear majority to act calmly and in a coordinated manner,” the French leader wrote to X. “I understand your message, your concerns and I am not going to remain unresponsive to them.”
According to European Parliament projections, the far-right Free Democrats party also topped Austria, winning 25.7% of the vote and doubling its number of MEPs to six.
In Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) are expected to win more than 30% of the vote, the same level as in 2019 when they won 29%.
The latest forecast puts the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in third place with 14.2%, up from 11% in 2019, behind Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.
Exit polls showed that Meloni’s Italian Brothers party, part of the right-wing European conservative and reformist group, fared much better than the centre-left opposition Democratic Party, which had an estimated approval rating of 23.7%.
The other two parties in Meloni’s government, Forza Italia and Ligua, did not appear to fare much better, with 10.5% and 8% respectively.
This rightward shift is also evident in Spain, where exit polls show Vox is expected to gain two to three MEPs, while a new far-right populist party, The Party Is Over, is expected to win two to three MEPs for the first time.
Four days after the vote, the outlook for the new legislature is still not set in stone.
The Netherlands is already shifting to the right
Countries such as the Netherlands vote on Thursday, with the latest projections showing Geert Wilders’ right-wing PVV party winning six seats.
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The change was less extreme than some had expected, resulting in a victory for the Green-Left/Labor coalition, which exit polls had predicted would win eight Dutch seats in the European Parliament.
The election, the world’s largest multinational democratic election, will determine the 720 members of the European Parliament who will deliberate EU legislation for the next five years.
This comes after a tumultuous period in which the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine and the rising cost of living were major concerns for voters.
Future tasks
One of MEPs’ first tasks will be to approve the candidate for European Commission president, with current president Ursula von der Leyen seeking a second term.
No single party has a majority in the European Parliament, and votes are often decided on an issue-by-issue basis by finding a coalition government that has the required majority.
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The House of Representatives has always been dominated by two major parties: the centre-right European People’s Party and the centre-left Socialist Party.
Both parties lost their majority in the 2019 election and have since been forced into informal alliances with parties such as the Greens and Liberals, making them unlikely to regain a majority in 2024, according to projections.
MEPs also have the power to amend or reject new legislation, making the fate of the EU Green Deal, an ambitious law to cut carbon emissions, uncertain.
Each country is allocated a certain number of MEPs based on its population: Germany has 96, while Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg have just six each.
For the first time since direct elections began in 1979, the UK, which lost 73 MEPs since Brexit Day in February 2020, will not be included in this number.
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