An American’s guide to the EU election

Hello and welcome to Europe 101, your handy guide to politics across the Atlantic Ocean.

We know you have a lot on your mind. A judge has found your former president guilty on 34 felony charges. Your current president isn’t totally sure what year it is. And these two paragons of democracy are gearing up for a clash of the titans in November, which understandably is sucking up all the oxygen on planet Earth. 

But how about some pre-game entertainment? Because Europe is also having an election.

Remember World II? And World War I for that matter? Both of those wars started in Europe, where it turns out that besides making great art and perfecting 7,900 varieties of local cuisine, people have a track record of violent political disagreements that end up in bloody conflicts.

Europe had such devastating wars that the key belligerents agreed enough was enough, and created a political structure called the European Union. 

Look, it’s not perfect! Its complexity makes Washington look quaint. As someone once said, there is no telephone number for “Europe.” But it has helped keep the peace over here for the last 65-odd years (if you start counting from the creation of the European Community, the EU’s precursor).

And guess what? They’re also major U.S. allies because just about every EU country, minus a few stragglers (ahem, Ireland; cough, Austria) also happen to be members of NATO, the alliance you set up to avoid wars 75 years ago.

So even though there’s a lot of untoward behavior in Europe, like using the metric system and speaking in obscure tongues, it is the main U.S. ally, as well as its key trading partner thanks to the huge numbers of Big Macs, iPhones and CSI: Miami episodes that America sells to Europe — and all the Champagne and handbags that go the other way.

OK, I’ll bite. So you’re electing the President of Europe?

Ha ha (nervous European laughter). Not exactly. We’re electing a new European Parliament, which is sort of like Congress, except there’s only one chamber and everyone speaks different languages.

Just like the United States, the European Union is made up of states, or countries, 27 of them. But it isn’t quite a federal system because each country remains fully sovereign, with its own president or prime minister (or both).

Nevertheless, in the EU election, nearly 400 million citizens will vote to elect representatives from their country, who will then work as lawmakers in the European Parliament, which has two bases — one in the French city of Strasbourg, the other in the Belgian capital of Brussels.

So the Parliament election is more like the mid-terms in the U.S., but it takes place at the beginning of the legislative term. And while Europeans are voting to elect 720 lawmakers rather than a president, the vote does have an indirect impact on who becomes president of the EU’s three key institutions: the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament.

European Council President Charles Michel, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. Benoit Doppagne/Belga via AFP/Getty Images

How so?

This is where things get tricky. Traditionally, the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council have been selected by EU leaders during a closed-door meeting after the election. These names would then be submitted to the European Parliament, whose lawmakers would have to confirm the choices by an absolute majority. This made sense as long as the European Commission president — arguably the most powerful of the three — was a largely bureaucratic role.

But over the past 15 years or so, the office of the Commission president has amassed considerable power. It’s in charge of trade policy for the entire EU, as well as enforcing competition law. And more recently, under current President Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission has taken on responsibility for Europe’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as coordinating support for Ukraine against Russia’s assault.

In light of these growing powers, the heads of the major political groups in the European Parliament have been pushing to give voters more say over who gets the top job in Brussels. In 2014, they introduced the so-called Spitzenkandidat, or lead candidate, system whereby the political group (an umbrella group of national parties) that wins the most votes in the European Parliament election gets to put forward its nominee for Commission president. According to current projections, the group that’s likely to win the most votes is the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), whose lead candidate is none other than von der Leyen.

The problem with this lead candidate system is that it’s not written into any EU treaties, and EU leaders basically hate it. No surprise there: Why would they want to give voters a direct say over the Commission president? That might give the impression that there is an actual president of Europe who’s more powerful than their own president or prime minister. Last time around, the leaders simply ignored the choice of lead candidate put forward by the EPP, a Bavarian guy called Manfred Weber, and chose von der Leyen instead.

Surely they’re not going to try this again?

Wrong. They are trying this again. Despite EU leaders dealing the Spitzenkandidat system a death blow in 2019, it’s back in zombie form. Each of the main pro-European political groups is putting forward a lead candidate who, in theory, is campaigning to be Commission president.

The lead candidates have had U.S.-style live debates in which they spar over policy issues of concern. Three debates have been held, including one (the best one) co-organized by POLITICO. But it’s very much unlike the U.S. in that people aren’t voting directly for these candidates but for the parties that back them. So von der Leyen’s name doesn’t appear on any ballot, but she’s still running a campaign that involves debates and stump speeches. There’s just no guarantee that the leaders will actually follow the lead candidate system and nominate the person from the party that won the most votes.

But the candidates are behaving as if the system will work?

Correct. They are going through the motions. Von der Leyen has visited 11 countries for “campaign events.” The Socialists & Democrats — a center-left party, sort of like the Democratic Party in the United States, but with more socialism — have their own candidate, a Luxembourgish man named Nicolas Schmit. The liberals have named three lead candidates. The Greens have two, and so forth.

Huh. Sounds complicated.

Yes, we apologize.

So, what’s the election about? Is there some big issue everyone is concerned about?

Not quite. That’s because the EU Parliament election isn’t actually a single election, but 27 different elections in each of the member countries. So there isn’t one issue that unites all Europeans like, say, gas prices. But there are broad themes that do concern all of Europe such as the economy, climate change, war in Ukraine, migration, and, funnily enough, the EU itself.

Indeed, the EU has lots of politicians who style themselves as “Euroskeptics,” or people who like to complain about the club’s officers and bylaws, which they want to overhaul, without actually wanting to leave the club. Except for Britain, which did actually vote to leave the EU back in 2016 — a prospect that the club’s officers never really planned for and were thus mightily flummoxed by.

So do y’all have red states and blue states?

Not quite. The EU isn’t a two-party system by any stretch of the imagination. There are dozens of parties that represent everything from mainstream conservatism to communism to environmental issues. There’s even something called the Pirate Party, and a satirical party — just for the lulz.

In the European Parliament, like-minded parties band together in so-called political groups, which then form coalitions. Power is held by the largest coalition, which in the current setup means the EPP (sort of like the Republicans, but anti-gun, pro-choice and pro-NATO); the Socialists and Democrats; the Greens (all in the name); and the Liberals, which is sort of a middle-ground party.

Members of the European Parliament raise their hands to vote during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

Then there’s Parliament’s hard-left and hard-right parties.

Is there a Donald Trump? A Joe Biden? A Marjorie Taylor Greene?

(More nervous laughter). Let’s just say that Europe has its own versions of these people. Trump, for example, is broadly comparable to someone like Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary who revels in provoking the Brussels elite. Orbán is friendly with Trump and seems to take fashion cues from the former president, like wearing his tie extra long. Both men project a “strongman” aura and seem to have sympathy for Russia’s Vladimir Putin — but remember, Orbán is not on the ballot in the European Parliament election, though his party, Fidesz, is.

Biden could broadly be compared to von der Leyen. His administration has worked closely with hers over the past five years, coordinating their approach to the Ukraine war. And keeping aside some obvious differences — von der Leyen is a woman 16 years younger than Biden — they are broadly aligned in terms of embracing a liberal, pro-Western agenda.

As for Taylor-Greene, there’s no direct equivalent, but the European Parliament is full of quirky characters who want to shake things up. The closest comparison is a duo of leftist Irish politicians named Claire Daly and Mick Wallace, who appear regularly on Chinese and Russian state television and tend to be against a U.S.-led global order.

OK. Like I said, we have a big election coming up. Why should we care about the European one?

You should care because the EU remains a key partner to the U.S. and because this election will provide a major signal on where the political winds are blowing.

For example: polls show that far-right and hard-right parties are poised to make substantial gains. In Germany, for instance, a party called Alternative for Germany, whose top candidate for the election was quoted as saying that not all Nazi SS troops were bad people, is poised to win the second-largest number of votes. In France, the National Rally, which is run by a family dynasty whose patriarch once called the Holocaust a “detail of history,” is poised to place first with more than 30 percent of votes, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling centrist party. And so on.

Depending on how well these far-right parties do, they are likely to exert considerable influence on the entire EU. On migration, for instance, far-right and conservative parties have already pressured the bloc’s leaders into taking a harder stance toward irregular migration than the United States — complete with walls, fences and a powerful border guard force called “Frontex” that has repeatedly been dragged before the courts for pushing people onto makeshift dinghies away from Europe’s coastline.

On Ukraine, many of these parties oppose helping Kyiv fight back against Russia, and are, by and large, more sympathetic toward America’s strategic adversaries, Russia, China and Iran, than the “mainstream” European parties. In some cases, this sympathy has gone beyond shared talking points to members of these parties allegedly taking money to do their bidding.

So what does an EU lawmaker do all day?

Well, they are not technically allowed to propose legislation — that’s the Commission’s job. So they spend a lot of time arguing over the fine print of laws handed down by the Commission. The Commission proposes a LOT of laws and the Parliament is pretty gung ho about letting them pass once its committees have worked their magic on them. This is where Europe gets laws like its AI Act, the world’s first binding regulations for artificial intelligence, or the Green Deal, a sweeping package of laws to limit emissions and protect the environment.

When they aren’t working on laws, the European Parliament spends a lot of time working on so-called “resolutions,” which are more or less statements on how the chamber feels about this or that thing, like “violence is bad” or “chocolate milk tastes good.” These resolutions are non-binding but have symbolic value.

Otherwise, lawmakers do lawmaker things: getting lobbied, going on fact-finding missions to fun destinations, participating in orgies, speaking to Chinese and Russian state media, making TikTok videos, and hanging out on a square in Brussels known as “Plux,” which is such a big thing they have made it into a verb, ie “are you Pluxing with us tonight?” 

Wait, all these people come from different countries. How do they understand each other?

Good question, two-part answer. Part one is translation. Europe has such a large translation budget to help everyone understand each other that it has to forego other niceties like, say, geopolitical power. The translators are paid, generously, by the European taxpayer, so the 720 lawmakers from places like Slovenia and Portugal can understand each other when they get up to speak in what they call the “hemicycle.” That’s why the lawmakers wear headsets while someone else is speaking, because that’s where the translation is coming from.

Part two of the answer is a dirty little secret: Everyone in the European Parliament more or less speaks English. In fact the entire bureaucracy of the EU operates in English, although this is a specific dialect — call it euro-English — that isn’t American or British English but its own thing, formed of 27 accents thrown into a big melting pot. Periodically, the French try to rise up and change this, pointing out that 300 years ago, the diplomatic lingua franca was French, and that Britain officially voted to leave the EU in 2016. But guess what? Three hundred years ago, we were all wearing powdered wigs and curing minor colds by blood-letting. The euro-English is pervasive and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Got it. So when should I pay attention?

There’s plenty going on. For example, von der Leyen is trying to build support for her second term, which means making sure she has enough backing among leaders and political groups. If chosen by the leaders, she will need to be approved by a majority in Parliament, which means building a coalition that will support her re-election. In doing so, von der Leyen is reaching out not just to the socialists, the Greens and the liberals but also the hard-right party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Von der Leyen’s not the only one seeking Meloni’s support. Thanks to the strength of right-wing parties across Europe, Meloni is in a bit of a kingmaker position. And she is being coveted by Europe’s far-right forces, who would like to draft her into their camp to form a sort of super-group of right-wing parties that would, if it came to pass, be much more like the Republican Party in the U.S. In fact, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has extended an invitation to Meloni to join her far-right group.

Practically speaking, the election takes place over a weekend, from June 6 to June 9. Results will trickle in throughout the evening of June 9. Due to the quirks of having 27 different electoral systems (Italy’s polls don’t close until 11 p.m. on June 9, for example), the definitive makeup of the next EU Parliament won’t be fully known until the morning of June 10.