European elections: Three major political families agree on distribution of senior EU officials in talks without extremists | European elections 2024 | News

Without Giorgia Meloni or representatives of the European far-right family. Negotiators from the populists, liberals and social democrats agreed this Tuesday on the distribution of senior EU positions for the next Community legislature. The shortlist, which will have to be approved by a majority by the European Council (i.e. the twenty-seven heads of state and government), remains as expected: Ursula von der Leyen, a German conservative, will be repeated as head of the European Commission; António Costa, the former Portuguese Socialist prime minister, will head the European Council; and the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, a liberal, as High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security. According to sources in the delegation, the European People’s Party has given up its ambition to occupy the Council for half a term, which means taking away Costa’s normal ability to be re-elected after her two-and-a-half-year term.

The negotiators of this reserve requirement, pending final approval, have been the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Spanish President, Pedro Sánchez, for the Social Democrats; the Greek Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the Polish Donald Tusk, for the populists; and the French Emmanuel Macron and the Dutch Mark Rutte, for the liberals. The agreement comes after a videoconference meeting and several days of negotiations, after last Monday’s meeting failed to reach an agreement on political support. This was because the European People’s Party was demanding half the mandate of the Council (instead of leaving five years for Costa) and there were also complaints from the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and other leaders, who were ignored in the negotiations by the three families.

The Italian Meloni’s European political group, the European Reformists and Conservatives (ECR), which has become the third-largest group in the European Parliament after the fall of the liberals, wanted to be part of the talks in some way. During the summit last Monday, he criticised the agreement being put together by the liberals, populists and social democrats, which he described as “ready-made”. Meloni now claims the position of executive vice president for the Commission and is focused on maintaining bilateral dialogue with von der Leyen.

If nothing gets in the way, the appointments of senior officials could be approved by a qualified majority (55% of states representing at least 65% of member states) at the European Council, which meets this Thursday and Friday in Brussels. But the litmus test for von der Leyen will be the confirmation of the European Parliament in July’s plenary session, where the German needs 361 votes out of 720 in a new, more polarised European Parliament. Its traditional coalition, which is popular with liberals and socialists, has 399 MEPs, which is very reasonable to guarantee approval since it has not even secured all the votes of the popular ones in a process that, moreover, is secret.

Now, to guarantee continuity at the head of the Community Executive, the German conservative – who has a good relationship with Meloni, the leader of the party with neo-fascist roots, Brothers of Italy, and which she considers acceptable extreme right – will have to decide whether to move further to the right still and form an alliance with the Italian prime minister to win the votes of the militants, or look to the Greens, who have offered themselves as an emergency brake for the extreme right if, in turn, von der Leyen does not forget the green agenda.

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