The European Commission’s unceremonious axing of a draft environmental law is the clearest sign yet of a new power dynamic in the EU institutions in which the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) — long the most powerful of Europe’s political families — has achieved something approaching dominance.
In a highly unusual step last month, the EPP-led Commission scrapped the draft Green Claims Directive, aimed at combatting corporate greenwashing, after receiving a letter from the EPP requesting it to do so on the grounds that it clashed with the bloc’s much-vaunted drive to slash red tape.
The law’s premature demise showed how the EPP, since last year’s European Parliament elections, is able to form voting majorities to its right as well as its left. The decline of the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the Greens groups also means that there is no viable coalition to the left of the EPP, effectively allowing it to dictate the terms of engagement.
This dynamic is also present in the European Council, where 10 of the 27 national governments are led by parties in the EPP and a further seven by parties on the right and far-right — again giving the EPP a potential majority on the right and making it a necessary part of any viable voting coalition. In the Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen and 13 of her commissioners hail from the EPP.
“In most Commissions in the last 70 years there’s been an EPP dominance, but the other groups — S&D and Renew — used to be more of a counterweight than they are nowadays,” Sophia Russack, a researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) specialising in the intricacies of the EU institutional architecture, told The Parliament.
Despite signing a coalition agreement with S&D and the centrist Renew Europe groups, the EPP has not been shy to vote with parties to its right on individual pieces of legislation — an alliance known as the “Venezuela majority” after first being used last October in a symbolic vote to recognise Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia as president.
“The EPP power over the three institutions is unprecedented,” Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at the HEC Paris Business School, told The Parliament. “Despite the Von der Leyen Commission being formally reliant on the traditional parliamentary majority based on mainstream, pro-EU parties, its agenda has been shifting towards the right to the point of seeking or accepting the support of all far-right parliamentary groups.”
Von der Leyen’s push to deregulate in a bid to revive Europe’s sagging competitiveness is evidence of that rightward pivot, following the free-market ideology of the EPP and the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group.
Critics of the simplification push warn that years of painstaking policymaking and hard-won political compromises are being torched in a matter of weeks. They also say that the Omnibus "simplification" bill undermines Von der Leyen’s mandate to maintain the green transition while boosting industrial competitiveness.
Sustainable finance rules and the carbon border levy were among the first laws to be chopped earlier this year in the name of streamlined compliance, with more regulations to follow suit.
Green Deal revanchism
It’s perhaps no surprise that the Green Deal is near the top of the EPP’s hit list. Back in 2019, when Von der Leyen announced the giant green bill in response to an electoral surge for the Greens, many of her fellow party members felt betrayed, Russack said, believing they had conceded too much to a progressive agenda they never fully embraced.
The attacks began more than a year ago, when the EPP waged a concerted campaign against the Nature Restoration Law, a proposal intended to restore depleted soil and revive biodiversity across the continent — but which was opposed by farmers, a key EPP constituency. Although the effort ultimately failed, the episode revealed an appetite for bold interventions against green policies.
More recently, a revised Climate Law setting a 90% emissions reduction target by 2040 granted several workarounds that critics saw as hollowing out the regulation. Defending the Commission’s line at a press conference, Vice-President Teresa Ribera, a staunchly pro-climate Socialist, hinted that there were new limits on how far climate legislation could go. “The world at the beginning of 2024 is not the world of today,” she said.
Thomas Thaler, a longtime EPP insider at the European Parliament who now works with consultancy APCO, argues that S&D and Renew should be asking themselves tough questions about how they can most effectively pursue their interests in this new environment: "Are we still constructive? Or are we going to make legislation more difficult [for the EPP] to adopt?”
He suggested that any attempt to punish the EPP for its perceived overreach risked pushing it further into the embrace of right-wing parties.
Beginnings of EPP resistance?
Nevertheless, the Commission is beginning to see a pushback against its increasingly presidential power. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, herself an EPP member, last month threatened to bring the EU executive to court for sidestepping lawmakers over plans to boost defense production by setting up a €150 billion loan programme.
And Von der Leyen will face a confidence vote on Thursday this week. Although she is expected to survive comfortably — the motion needs a two-thirds majority to bring her down — the vote could unite politicians of the left and right in opposition to her.
Alemanno believes that Von der Leyen will soon have to choose whether to properly commit to her centrist coalition or formally break in favour of the Venezuela majority. “By the next state of the union [speech in September] she will have to publicly commit to one, not two parliamentary majorities,” he said.
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