Europe, new parliament takes office: industry and environment as priorities
Immediately the election of the president, with Roberta Metsola towards probable confirmation, on Thursday the vote of confidence on Ursula von der Leyen
by our correspondent Beda Romano
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STRASBOURG - The start of the 10th European parliamentary term gets into full swing this week, first with the election of the President of the Parliament and then with the vote of confidence in the President-designate of the Commission. Meanwhile, the priorities of the new assembly are already clear: industry on the one hand and the environment on the other. Not for nothing will these be the workhorses of Ursula von der Leyen in her speech next Thursday, in order to wrest support from the largest possible majority.
In the new parliament, fragmentation has increased. There are eight groups, one more than in the previous legislature. The clearest shake-ups occurred on the right. In fact, the nationalists of Identity & Democracy broke up to recompose themselves around the Hungarian Fidesz movement and the Patriots of Europe. On the far right, a new faction has emerged, the Europe of Sovereign Nations, which belongs to Alternative für Deutschland. Almost unchanged is the group of Conservatives (ECR), from Fratelli d'Italia.
Right-wingers 25% of seats
.According to Engjellushe Morina, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, 'populist and far-right parties will exert more influence on the EU agenda'. That said, the presence of three groups on the right is indicative. It reflects the increase in seats in this part of the hemicycle (187 in all, out of 720, i.e. 25% of the total), but also the difficulty of these parties to understand each other. Alongside the pro-Russian sovereignists, there are Eurosceptic patriots and Atlanticist conservatives.
Today, Tuesday 16, the popular Maltese Roberta Metsola, assisted by 14 vice-presidents, should be re-elected president of the assembly by secret ballot. The distribution of posts will be based on the D'Hondt proportional system (named after the Belgian mathematician Victor D'Hondt in the second half of the 19th century). A cordon sanitaire should put the candidates of the two most extreme parties, i.e. the patriots and the sovereignists, in a minority.
After lengthy negotiations between the parliamentary groups, the composition of the 20 parliamentary committees (plus four subcommittees) was also decided in recent days. The two largest committees will be those for Industry and the Environment: they will both have 90 members. In the previous legislative period they had 78 and 88 members respectively. This figure is not trivial because it basically reflects the priorities Parliament wants to set itself during the legislative period.
