Between continuity and renewal, the European Parliament returns to Strasbourg

Five weeks after the European elections in June, the 720 MEPs elected in the 27 Member States to serve for the next five years are meeting this week at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The new European Parliament resulting from the elections will hold its first session in Strasbourg from Tuesday 16 July. A constitutive session during which the 720 deputies will first have to elect the president of the Assembly, then the heads of its main bodies. A high point will take place on Thursday, with the vote on whether or not to reappoint Ursula Von der Leyen as head of the European Commission. No major upheaval is expected, but the chamber is largely renewed, with more than one in two members newly elected and whose political balances have been shaken by the rise of sovereignist and far-right parties.

At first glance, the balances in the European Parliament seem to be continuing: the European People’s Party (EPP), winner of the elections, retains the largest group. This is what allows the German Ursula Von der Leyen to run for a second term as President of the Commission on Thursday. It also favors the re-election on Tuesday of the Maltese Roberta Metsola as President of the European Parliament. This presidency of the European Parliament, the EPP generally shares it at mid-term with the Socialists and Democrats group, which is again second. As for the centrist liberals of the Renew group, they are now only in fifth position.

This is where the situation changes: the group where the RN sits and chaired by Jordan Bardella, renamed the Patriots for Europe, becomes, thanks to the support of the Hungarians of Viktor Orban’s party, the third political force in Parliament, behind the right and the socialists. The ECR group, of European conservatives and reformists, where the Italians of Giorgia Meloni, Marion Maréchal and the excluded from the Reconquête party sit, is fourth ahead of the centrists. Finally, the German party AfD has united with a few isolated elected representatives within the Europe of Nations group and comes in sixth position in the new Parliament.

With one elected representative, the sovereignist and far-right parties in third and fourth positions weigh as much as the right, which came out on top in the elections. But their differences of opinion, particularly on Russia, did not allow the formation of a single group. Their 187 elected representatives thus sit in three separate groups, compared to two previously. In a dispersed march, these three groups will probably have little weight in Parliament and will remain, for at least two of them, largely ostracized because of their Euroscepticism and their pro-Putin fibre.

Only ECR, the group of conservatives and reformists, considered less unsavoury, could obtain some influential positions and act as a supporting force for the right in an attempt to impose its line on the green pact or immigration.