A “sharp turn to the right”. With less than five months before the European elections (June 6 to 9, 2024), the trends are becoming clearer. In a vast projection study published this Wednesday, January 24, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank predicts a spectacular breakthrough by nationalist right-wing parties in the various member states of the European Union. This progression will logically be accompanied by a loss of seats for progressive and centrist groups, currently in the majority in the European Parliament.
The two authors of this study collected the most recent opinion polls in each EU member state and applied a statistical model of the performance of national parties in previous years. This model predicts the share of votes each national party will win in the 2024 European Parliament elections and calculates how many seats they are each likely to win.
Thus, the nationalist right parties of nine Member States could come out on top next June: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia . They could also come second or third in nine other countries: Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Spain, Latvia, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. The radical right group Identity and Democracy (ID), of which the National Rally is a part, could thus increase from 58 to 98 seats, and establish itself as the third force in Parliament.
Because conversely, the three large centrist groups of the European People’s Party (EPP), the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S
At the same time, the Greens would also lose seats (61 against 71 currently), but the left party would gain some, going from 38 to 44. On the right, the group of European Conservatives and Reformists could gain 18 deputies (85 against 67 ) and the non-registered would see their number decrease (from 51 to 42). These projections reflect the long-term decline in support for mainstream parties and the growing support for extremist parties.
Finally, the “super coalition” (EPP, S
This paradigm shift could have several consequences on the EU political agenda, according to ECFR. If the new composition of Parliament should not, initially, affect aid to Ukraine, for example, the fact that the grand centrist coalition will likely be less dominant than before could have an influence on certain issues, such as economic and fiscal freedom, the environment, or immigration and asylum policies.
