As destabilizing as Brexit has been for European politics, when it comes to the composition of the next European Parliament, it’s likely to make things easier for fans of the European project.
To be sure, there’s much about the U.K.’s departure from the European Union that’s still uncertain. What kind of relationship will London decide it wants with the bloc? Will it indeed leave by the March 29 deadline? And what happens if it’s still a member on July 2 when the new European Parliament assembles in Strasbourg? The latter is particularly worrying, given that the country is not planning to participate in the May election that will determine the institution’s composition.
And yet, one thing is clear. If Britain does get its act together and go, it will take with it many of the politicians and political parties that have obstructed progress in recent decades.
Brexit makes it more — not less — likely that the next European Parliament will be dominated by mainstream politicians. EU politics is going to be more stable than many predict.
That’s because British MEPs have for the most part been troublemakers — far less likely to favor further integration or cooperation than their European counterparts. The departure of Britain’s representatives will redraw the power lines in the institution, in a way that favors the proponents of the European project.
Without the Brits, the European Parliament’s far-right forces will have to rethink their formations.
Of the 73 MEPs elected in 2014, 45 sat in political groups to the right of the conservative European People’s Party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Their departure will leave a big hole in Parliament’s right-wing forces, collapsing two of the major Euroskeptic parliamentary groups.
One of them is the European Conservatives and Reformists, which is co-chaired by British MEP Syed Kamall of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party and Ryszard Legutko of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party. The other is the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, which is led by ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage and includes Italy’s anti-establishment 5Stars.
Without the Brits, the Parliament’s far-right forces — including allies of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s League and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally now sitting in the Europe of Nations and Freedom bloc — will have to rethink their formations.
The alarm among some commentators that a wave of radical populists will take over the new Parliament is misplaced. Nationalists tend not to like other nationalists, and eccentrics are usually loners. The formation of effective groups of illiberal sovereigntists is highly improbable. The Yellow Jackets are not about to storm the Parliament.
Indeed, Europe’s far right will be hard pressed to fill more than a quarter of seats in the hemicycle, even if a dozen MEPs from Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, currently part of the EPP, were to leave the conservatives and join their ranks.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the loss of Britain’s 20 Labour MEPs will have a muted impact on the fate of their grouping, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
Although some Labour MEPs have played a prominent role in the Parliament — including Richard Corbett, the party’s leader in the chamber, and Claude Moraes, who chairs the civil liberties committee — British Labour has not been central to the dynamics of the European socialism for some years.
The party’s MEPs tend to be less progressive than mainland colleagues on social and economic issues and more conservative when it comes to EU constitutional questions. British Labour MEPs opposed, for example, the introduction of transnational lists in Parliament elections, a long sought-after objective among federalists.
Without the Brits, the S&D group will be smaller, sure, but it will move further to the left and become more federalist.
The Liberals, having lost all but one British MEP in 2014, will be the least affected by Brexit. Their biggest transformation will come in the form of a likely alliance with French President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche deputies, which will boost their ranks. The Greens — which count three active British members, and three Scottish or Welsh nationalists — however, will feel the loss of their British MEPs keenly.
Much has been made of the imminent collapse of the bipartisan coalition of EPP and S&D — which some say faces the same messy dynamics as Merkel’s troubled “grand coalition” in Berlin. But the cooperation between the two is often overstated.
The two parties worked together to divvy up key EU posts, but their two-step hasn’t been as evident in matters of legislation, where ALDE has become a powerful player — and will continue to be so in the next mandate.
When it comes to electing the next European Commission president — and deciding on a host of other top EU jobs — the departure of Britain’s MEPs is unlikely to make much of a difference.
After all, in 2014, opposition from the both the British Conservative and Labour parties was not enough to stop the Spitzenkandidat experiment that saw Jean-Claude Juncker elected Commission chief.
In 2019, the Brits will be far from a disinterested party: Whoever runs the EU executive will be critically important if and when the U.K. embarks on negotiations of its future relationship with the bloc. But London will be just a bystander as European leaders decide on Juncker’s successor.
With British resistance removed, it will be close to impossible to oppose any joint decision by the German chancellor and the French president.
If there is a cloud on the horizon for proponents of the European project, it is that governments and MEPs that used to hide behind the Brits’ reliable Euroskepticism will be forced to reveal more of their own reservations about the direction of EU law and policy.
The departure of the U.K. will also surely raise the stakes for the Franco-German axis. With British resistance removed, it will be close to impossible to oppose any joint decision by the German chancellor and the French president.
Eurozone reform will be an obvious testing ground for the new partnership between Paris and Berlin. But Merkel and Macron also have plans to shake up European elections in time for the next ballot in 2024, by allowing some MEPs to be elected through transnational party lists as part of pan-EU constituencies — a change that could transform the way European politics are done.
Brexit will, in all likelihood, leave the Brits standing and staring as a more federal Union takes shape across the Channel.
