(This was originally published by EurActiv on 9 January 2017. In February 2025 I requested that it be deleted from the Euractiv site.)

Political Brussels woke up on Monday morning – the first day back at work in 2017 for many people – to the shock news that the Italian MEPs of the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) are likely to abandon their current parliamentary allies, who include UKIP, and to join the Liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament. Many wondered how Liberal group leader Guy Verhofstadt, one of the most outspoken federalists in European politics, who had excoriated the M5S leader Beppe Grillo in an interview in 2014, could possibly ally with a party whose leadership has opposed Italy’s membership of the euro.

But it is less strange than it may at first appear. The 17 M5S MEPs have established themselves as serious operators in the parliamentary system – unlike their current UKIP allies, who openly deride the institution to which they have been elected. The fact that the UK is likely to leave the EU in 2019 means that the EFDD group, which currently depends on UKIP and M5S for its critical mass, has little future. Grillo himself does not want Italy to leave the EU; his plans for a long-term future in European politics therefore require new allies.

Looking at the other side of the equation, ALDE’s federalism, as opposed to Verhofstadt’s personal position, is often overstated. Like all groups in the European Parliament, it is a little blurry at the edges. New members such as the Czech ANO 2011 are notably less Euro-enthusiastic than the old Liberal core; and even within the core, the Danes and Dutch have moved to a more critical position of late. So the distance between the M5S and ALDE in practice in the European Parliament is much less than the apparent distance between their leaders.

ALDE currently has 68 seats to the Conservative ECR’s 74. The arrival of 17 new MEPs will make the ALDE group clearly the third force in the European Parliament, which will make a difference in internal appointments which are based on the size of the group.  They will presumably also swell Verhofstadt’s numbers in the short term as he contests the presidency of the European Parliament (though the two Italian front runners, Gianni Pitella of the S&D and Antonio Tajani of the EPP, start with significant advantages). There is already some loud internal grumbling about Verhofstadt’s leadership within ALDE, and not only about the new Italian allies. But the fact that he has appointed well-respected Dutch and French MEPs Sophie in’t Veld and Marielle de Sarnez to manage the relationship with M5S will go some way to reassuring the sceptics.

The wider political lesson is that populist political forces have more than one fate, and one of those possible fates is to go mainstream and assimilate to the political establishment. M5S, if it survives in the long term, will always be more edgy than most of its stablemates, whichever political group it is in. But their alliance with the Liberals may go some way to taming their reputation.

(This was originally published by EurActiv on 26 November 2015. In February 2025 I requested that it be deleted from the Euractiv site.)

On 11 November the European Parliament called for a series of changes to future elections of its own members, including a common minimum voting age across EU states, electoral thresholds in the larger countries, guaranteed voting rights for EU citizens living abroad, and a requirement to finalise candidate lists promptly. 

Most of all, the Parliament wants to enshrine the Spitzenkandidat system used in the 2014 election – where the nominee of the largest political group was presented as the Parliament’s choice for President of the European Commission – by setting up a single EU-wide electoral constituency, for which all transnational European parties would nominate their Spitzenkandidaten.

But how would this look in practice? Last year, the centre-right European People’s Party claimed victory, and anointed Jean-Claude Juncker as the voters’ choice, by winning 215 seats in the new European Parliament to the 185 won by the Party of European Socialists, who supported European Parliament President Martin Schulz. 

It is not generally realized that if there had been a single EU-wide constituency, Schulz would likely have been the winner. The fact is that the EPP got slightly fewer votes than the PES,but ended up with more seats. Wikipedia, which also includes votes for MEPs who joined the groups after the election, gives the PES 40.2 million votes to the EPP’s 38.6 million; my own calculations, counting only those who were affiliated on election day, make the gap much narrower, 39.6 million to 39.3 million, but the outcome is still clear.)

The EPP won more seats with fewer votes for three reasons. First, the EPP is stronger than the PES in most of the smaller EU member states, where MEPs represent fewer electors per capita. So, rather small leads in terms of votes delivered disproportionate benefits in terms of seats in Slovenia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Croatia, Ireland and Bulgaria. Denmark was the only smaller state where the PES won more seats than the EPP. 

Second, the PES lead in votes was diluted in some countries by relatively high turnout. Among the enthusiastic voters of Italy, the Partito Democratico won 31 seats with 11 million votes, while three EPP groups won 17 seats between them with just under 6 million votes. But that 14-seat margin in favour of the PES, gained by 5 million more votes, was more than counterbalanced by the result in low-turnout Poland, where two EPP groups had a combined lead of only 2 million votes over the centre-left, yet won 18 more seats.

Third, the electoral system in some countries, whether by accident or design, favours the EPP. In Belgium and in Italy, there are reserved single seats for German-speaking minorities, who tend to vote for EPP-affiliated candidates. In Ireland, Fine Gael won four seats for the EPP – 36% of the country’s 11 seats – with only 22% of the votes, while Labour, with 5% of the votes won no seats at all. (Fine Gael actually won fewer votes in Ireland than ALDE-linked Fianna Fail; but the latter elected only one MEP, and he promptly defected after the election.)

Looking further down the ticket, the situation becomes even murkier. The third-placed party in the European Parliament at present is the conservative ECR grouping, with 75 MEPs. But in terms of the popular vote (according to Wikipedia’s figures), they came not third but seventh, with 8.6 million votes to 9.2 million for the Greens/EFA, 10.8 million for the UKIP-led EFDD, 11.7 million for the liberal ALDE and just over 12 million for the hard-left GUE, who have only 51 MEPs. Like the EPP, the ECR benefited from picking up easily won seats in smaller countries, and by doing well in two large countries with low turnouts, the UK and Poland.

Those who want to open up the strengths and weaknesses of the European Parliament elections to further public interest should be careful what they ask for – because they may get it. It’s entirely possible to imagine a situation where a Spitzenkandidatwins a decisive lead in the EU-wide popular vote, but his or her party lags badly in terms of seats in the European Parliament. Arguably that is actually what happened last year. A single European constituency, by exposing the disconnection between votes won and seats gained, may weaken the credibility of the process in practice.