Von der Leyen needs 361 votes to keep her job. Good luck with that.

BRUSSELS — In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen only secured her job as European Commission president by a razor-thin majority in the the European Parliament: nine votes.

This year, the numbers game required to secure a second term from a potentially way more hostile European Parliament after the June 6-9 EU election looks even tougher. There is a very real chance the German conservative just won’t get the votes.

In order to win another stint running the EU from the 13th floor of the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels, von der Leyen needs to overcome two major political hurdles.

First, she needs to win support from a qualified majority of the 27 EU leaders around the European Council table during a post-election meeting in late June. Second, she must secure at least 361 votes from 720 Members of European Parliament to confirm the leaders’ choice during a subsequent, secret vote in Parliament.

Things are easier on the Council front. Von der Leyen’s center-right European People’s Party (EPP) has 12 EU heads of state and government on its books, all of whom can be expected to rally behind her. There’s always a danger things could go wrong: France’s Emmanuel Macron could plump for another candidate, and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz hails from the socialist camp. For now, however, the national leaders aren’t giving her a splitting political migraine: That’s the Parliament.

The polls suggest von der Leyen’s EPP will be the biggest single group in Parliament after the election, with 170 seats. To build a majority, she will then need to offer goodies to the other big centrist groups — the socialists and liberals — in post-electoral horse trading. The deals will hinge on which countries get top jobs in Brussels — think trade and economy roles in the commission — and which political parties will get leading roles on Parliament committees.

Even then, however, we need to get our calculators out and crunch through how the numbers stack up. You can wager von der Leyen will be doing just that.

Do the math

If she manages to secure support from the EPP, the liberal Renew Europe group and the Socialists and Democrats, that would amount to some 390 seats, according to projections from POLITICO’s poll of polls. 

That would put her over the 361-threshold, but it’s not that simple. Experts and political insiders warn that even if party leaders order them to back von der Leyen, it’s likely that something over 10 percent of the lawmakers in each of these groups will either oppose her or abstain on the big day.

A 10 percent attrition rate would bring von der Leyen’s total down to 351, 10 short of the critical number. And that’s a generous estimate: According to the political insiders POLITICO spoke to for this article, the rebellion rate will almost certainly run higher than 10 percent, even inside von der Leyen’s own EPP. In previous votes, the rebels bucking the party line have been between 13 percent and 28 percent.

Back in 2019, von der Leyen won her nine-vote majority thanks to the support of the EPP, Renew and S&D. She also bagged a number of votes from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. There’s no way she will get those two camps this time round. She has pushed PiS and Fidesz hard on their rule-of-law failings and her administration has cast them as the bloc’s bêtes noires.

A senior EPP insider said on condition of anonymity that the boss needed to go on a lobbying drive to Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in Poland | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

When it comes to the socialists and liberals, a growing number of their MEPs might shoot down von der Leyen this year because they are concerned she is willing to consider an alliance with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. They also accuse her of watering down the EU’s green agenda.

Additionally, there are bright red danger signs that the number of rebels within her own EPP ranks could be strangely high. France’s Les Républicains — expected to have six MEPs — do not back her, and EPP insiders fear shaky support among their Italian, Spanish and Slovenian delegations. Ominously, at the EPP’s congress to nominate her in Bucharest in March, 18 percent of the 499 delegates who cast a vote said “no” to von der Leyen.

Acknowledging this concern about getting full support from EPP rank-and-file in a secret vote, a senior EPP insider said on condition of anonymity that the boss needed to go on a lobbying drive to Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in Poland and Spain’s Partido Popular.

“She (von der Leyen) needs to roll her sleeves up and call everyone. She needs to keep doing it until the campaign ends. She needs to push hard to make Spain happen. She needs to push hard to make Poland happen. It takes planning,” the EPP insider said.

In the French dissenting camp of the EPP, François Xavier Bellamy, a member of Les Républicains, said that if the president of the European Commission is not reelected “it will be thanks to the fight we’ve led which put her in the minority in her own party.”

Bellamy only represents a small number of lawmakers, but his suggestion that other national delegations may also oppose von der Leyen — coupled with less-than-overwhelming support for her during the nomination conference in Bucharest in March — hints at the risk of a considerable shortfall.

The Meloni factor

Von der Leyen has been assiduously courting Italian Prime Minister Meloni, whose support she will need both at the Council table and in Parliament, but it looks like a strategy that could well backfire. The closer she gets to Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the more votes she will hemorrhage from the socialists and liberals.

Meloni’s support will be crucial to her nomination in Council but her value is less obvious in the Parliament where her Brothers of Italy party is only on course to pick up about 10 seats — far less than the combined force of Fidesz and Law and Justice.

Those 10 votes would almost certainly be outweighed by the loss of votes from the Socialists, many of whom, particularly in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party in Germany, would turn against von der Leyen for her dalliance with Meloni.

The Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew and Greens have said they will not support von der Leyen’s reelection if she makes any kind of a deal with Meloni’s hard-right allies in Parliament. That may or may not be an idle threat — the terms of such a deal may not be made public, and the vote is secret — but it still raises concerns about the level of support in Parliament.

Von der Leyen has been assiduously courting Italian Prime Minister Meloni | Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

If von der Leyen abandons hope of receiving support from the ECR, she would need backing not just from Renew and S&D, but also the Greens, to make up for the shortfall. With the Greens in the mix, von der Leyen’s projected base of support would be 432 votes — more than enough to pass the threshold even taking into account a considerable attrition rate.

But nothing is less predictable than what kind of support she can expect from the Greens, who did not support von der Leyen in any systemic way back in 2019. Speaking to POLITICO, German Greens lawmaker Daniel Freund pointed out the Greens had worked closely with von der Leyen throughout her term in power and could yet offer support for her reelection, though such support would come in exchange for a “list of demands.”

“The question is: What do we get if we make a deal to work with her?” he asked. “As Greens we have a long list of demands of things we’d like to change.”

“If we continue the Green Deal, the rule of law, if that is her agenda, my prediction is that this is something very much the Greens can carry,” he added.

Yet those very commitments for the Greens could prove toxic for von der Leyen’s support among conservatives, who have specifically rebelled against key aspects of Green Deal in the last year of her mandate, namely the phaseout of the combustion engine and a nature restoration law.

Adding to the uncertainty, von der Leyen is likely to have to make any such deals in a mad-dash of negotiation following the late-June meetings of the European Council. Several political groups are pushing to hold the confirmation for the next Commission president in July, during the last plenary session before the summer recess — which leaves her an extremely narrow window in which to construct a possibly highly complex coalition deal between Renew, S&D, the EPP and the Greens.

While other factions have pressed for the deal to be done in July, Freund indicated openness to extending the timeframe until September — something EPP party president Manfred Weber has also been pushing for. More time might buy von der Leyen some breathing room to avoid a humiliation in Parliament.

“Von der Leyen is not a risk-taker,” Freund added. “She won’t want to be taking the walk of shame out of Parliament.”