Two new parliaments

Two critical meetings of legislatures are happening in Europe tomorrow. France’s National Assembly meets for the first time since its recent election, and the European parliament meets, not for its first session since last month’s election (it did that yesterday), but for the critical one.

Neither body is quite what we expect from parliamentary government. In France, although the government is responsible to the Assembly, considerable independent power remains in the hands of the president, who has his own mandate. In the European parliament responsibility is even more attenuated, but the head of government must still win a parliamentary vote of confidence before taking office: that’s what is to happen tomorrow.

Incumbent centre-right prime minister (officially “president of the European commission”) Ursula von der Leyen has been reappointed for a second term by the EU heads of government (this post from 2019 explains something of the process). Last time she won the vote of confidence, which requires an absolute majority, by 383 to 327, with another 41 absent or abstaining. But the groups on which her majority depends lost ground at the election, so this time it is expected to be closer.

Von der Leyen has in general terms the support of the three mainstream blocs: centre-right, centre-left and liberals. Between them they have 401 of the 720 members (188, 136 and 77 respectively – parliament is smaller this time due to the British exit), a reduced but still comfortable majority. But not all of those MPs will vote for her: last time she leaked about 60 votes from her nominal level of support, and if that happens again she will be in trouble.

There are also 53 Greens MPs, who are also these days pretty mainstream and could be persuaded to support von der Leyen. With the far right breathing down the necks of all the mainstream groups, this is hardly the time for them to be indulging petty differences. Yet it is feared that tensions between the Greens and a large part of the centre-right will prevent them from working together.

The other 266 MPs break down into four groups, with a residue of those who are yet to join a group. The far left has 46 members, an increase of nine. The far-right group previously called Identity & Democracy has relabelled itself “Patriots for Europe”; it has 84 members, making it now the third-largest group [link added]. Slightly more moderate is the Eurosceptic group, European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), with 78. And on the extreme right there is a new group, Europe of Sovereign Nations, consisting of those whose fascism and Putinism were too extreme for the Patriots [link added] – most of its 25 MPs are from Alternative for Germany.

That leaves 33 so far unattached (called non-inscrits); most of them belong to political currents that could be described as far left or far right, or some mixture of the two. One of the most alarming things about Europe in recent times is the way that the two have converged. The largest single group among the non-inscrits is Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a far-left anti-immigrant movement, and the increase in membership of the far left group is due to the adhesion of Italy’s Five-Star Movement, previously known for its cohabitation with the far right.

ECR, on the other hand, is trying to present a more respectable and anti-Putinist front, and it’s now expected that a number of its MPs, including those from Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, will vote to support von der Leyen. There may be a further reshuffling of groups on the hard right to come.

Meanwhile in France, prime minister Gabriel Attal has finally had his resignation accepted (although he remains in office as a caretaker); he will take up leadership of the centrist parliamentary group. But parliament does not directly choose his replacement: tomorrow’s vote will be for the parliamentary Speaker, although that will tell us something about how the different groups in the Assembly line up.

Three major groups are almost equally matched; the left with about 195 of the 577 seats, the centre with about 174 and the far right with about 143. The only other substantial group is the centre-right with about 60; if it sides with the centre it can give it a plurality, but still a long way short of a majority. Since no-one proposes to work with the far right, no majority can be formed without some sort of co-operation between at least some of the centre and the left.

The period between the two rounds was Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s finest hour: he quickly and explicitly embraced the cause of republican solidarity, giving a lead to the other parties to rally together against the far right. For that, France and possibly the world is in his debt. Since then, however, he has reverted to anti-democratic type, arguing both that the left is entitled to dictate the government, even though it has no majority, and that his party, LFI, is entitled to dictate to the left as a whole, even though it represents only a minority within it.

After much discussion and disagreement, the other components of the New Popular Front (Socialists, Greens and Communists) have now proposed Laurence Tubiana, head of the European Climate Foundation, as their candidate for prime minister. Since she is aligned with the Socialists (although she was a Trotskyist in her youth), the suggestion is strongly opposed by LFI – and even if she can overcome that problem, she still has to win the support, or at least the acquiescence, of Emmanuel Macron and enough of his MPs.

Macron has been weakened, but he retains the key strength he has had all along, that of being positioned in the centre and therefore able to play left and right against each other. He clearly has his eye on a government in which a centrist prime minister can secure sufficient support from both the centre-right and the left (minus LFI) to carry on, and he may yet succeed.

In both Strasbourg and Paris the fundamental issue is the same: the friends of democracy need to work together, to build as broad a front as possible to sustain the institutions on which civilisation depends. There are times when narrow sectarianism is a luxury we can afford, but this is not one of them.