One year after the 2024 election bolstered right-wing forces in the European Parliament, POLITICO’s data shows that they don’t team up often — but win when they do. 

The Parliament’s traditional centrist majority comprising the conservative European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats and the liberal Renew group came under pressure when last year’s EU election delivered clear wins for the EPP, the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the far right while reducing numbers for the liberals and Greens.

That has led to increased tensions among political groups, with Socialist and liberal lawmakers accusing the EPP of siding with far-right factions to push through measures — a conflict that took center stage in this past summer’s no-confidence motion against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. 

The EPP is “playing with fire and will get burned,” Maltese EU lawmaker Alex Agius Saliba, first vice president of the S&D, told POLITICO.

To gauge those concerns one year into the new legislature, POLITICO analyzed plenary voting in the European Parliament based on records of votes considered decisive for every bill, as registered on POLITICO’s Pro platform. 

1. The grand coalition is alive and kicking

With the first year of the new term wrapped, the grand coalition isn’t dead and buried — not in the least. 

POLITICO’s analysis of plenary voting records shows the EPP, S&D and Renew still voted alike in the vast majority of decisive plenary votes.

In the previous term, they did so in 90 percent of recorded votes. In the new Parliament, that share has so far slipped just slightly to 88 percent. Renew was typically a part of that majority.

2. EPP and ECR were sporadic allies …

The stats do not indicate that the EPP developed a new habit of teaming up with the right-wing ECR against the S&D in the plenary.

According to POLITICO’s data, the EPP voted with ECR and against S&D in about 6 percent of final plenary votes — the same as last term. 

What has changed, however, is that the EPP and ECR won more of those votes than before. The small number of votes this term so far means future votes could reverse their winning streak. Still, the shift reflects the stronger presence of conservative and right-wing parties in the Hemicycle after last year’s election, which opened the door for the EPP to win votes with right-wing support.

Many of the plenary votes that saw the EPP and ECR stick together against the Socialists involved nonbinding texts such as resolutions on human rights violations. However, the groups also banded together on a few votes that did change legislation, including a bill to water down the protection of wolves. 

The EPP “strive[s] to find a consensus in the center” and the “vast majority of votes are won” there, said Dutch Member of the European Parliament Jeroen Lenaers, chief whip for the EPP group.

But, Lenaers added, “We’re not going to change our own positions based on who might or might not vote in favor of them.”

Socialist MEPs, however, insist a more fundamental shift has happened within the EPP. 

Agius Saliba said the EPP is “using far-right support to get their way in negotiations in which EU policy is shaped” instead of “working on a compromise within the von der Leyen centrist platform.”

He added that the EPP had teamed up with the far right at the committee level and in the administrative decision-making bodies of the Parliament.

“That is the reality we are facing, that is the real shift me and my fellow lawmakers have seen this term,” Agius Saliba said.

3. … but S&D and the ECR vote together too

For all their criticism of the EPP, the center-left S&D also regularly end up in the same camp as the right-wing ECR.

According to plenary voting numbers of the first year of the new Parliament, the Socialists voted with the ECR and against the EPP about as regularly as the EPP did against S&D — and significantly more often than in the previous term.

But while the EPP and the ECR voted together on several politically charged texts, votes that saw the S&D take the same side as the ECR were, for the most part, technical ones. They included implementing decisions to clear a product for the EU’s single market or setting standards for the amount of toxic substances allowed in specific products.

The ECR group is “advocating and legislating policies that resonate with European citizens and businesses,” Italian MEP Nicola Procaccini, co-chair of the group, said in written comments.

He added: “If other groups are belatedly coming round to our position, so much the better.”

But the S&D’s Agius Saliba pushed back against that take, saying the plenary “numbers game” doesn’t capture the fact that “there can be opposite motivations to vote down a report or an amendment in plenary.”

“For S&D, it can be that the achieved compromise is not progressive enough, while the far right votes for completely other reasons and motivation,” he said.

“Does that mean we cooperated with them?”

More broadly, POLITICO’s data shows that the Parliament’s majority position matched the ECR’s position in 80 percent of the votes, compared with 73 percent in the previous term — reflecting the group’s increased political weight following its 2024 EU election win.

According to Procaccini, that’s a part of a post-election “recalibration” — with the ECR at its “forefront.”

“The election recalibrated European politics away from excessive regulation and the pursuit of ideological purity,” he said.

4. Right-wing bloc has numbers — but no habit of voting together

A coalition of all right-wing groups voting against the Socialists and liberals could reap the benefits of the Parliament’s new power balance as well — though such votes remain uncommon.

A so-called Venezuela majority — named after a resolution on the South American country’s rule-of-law violations in which the EPP, the ECR, the far-right Patriots for Europe and the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group voted together for the first time — was rare in the previous Parliament. In the current Hemicycle, it has remained exceptional as well.

While there have only been a small number of votes where the right-wing bloc grouped together, their wins in the new term reflect their increased political weight in the Hemicycle.

5. Patriots still isolated

While the ECR has become more of a fixture in the Parliament’s voting majorities, the gulf with MEPs further to the right actually appears to have grown.

The new Patriots for Europe group absorbed many of the national parties that sat with the far-right Identity and Democracy group in the previous Parliament, such as France’s National Rally.

But so far, this Parliament’s plenary numbers suggest the Patriots voted less frequently with the EPP or S&D than their predecessor.

But remember: It’s not all about the plenary

The comparatively small number of final plenary votes that have taken place since the election means some early shifts in the data could still be reversed in the next years of this Parliament’s term.

And final plenary votes, which serve as the data for this piece, merely represent the final stage of decision-making in the Parliament. Prior to that there are many policymaking steps where lawmakers vote, such as committee sessions. 

There are also special bodies, namely the Conference of Presidents, that take important decisions on internal Parliament workings and agendas.

Following the EU election, the power balance in all these bodies also shifted to the right — and it’s in these venues that the Socialists and Liberals accuse the EPP of relying on far-right votes to pass their priorities instead of compromising with the center. 

Gregory Roche contributed data.