Italian PM Meloni pushes for greater EU influence

The EU parliament group led by Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party is on track to overtake its centrist rival, which is linked to France’s Emmanuel Macron. This jostling for position comes ahead of an EU leaders’ summit next week to allocate the union’s most influential jobs – largely based on the relative influence of the parliament’s political groups following this month’s election.

Meloni believes that the relative success of her European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group should translate to a key spot in the allocation of positions, and has been making her views known. “It is a role of the highest rank that I intend to claim for Italy,” she told Il Giornale newspaper on Wednesday, calling it “surreal” that fellow leaders had floated an initial lineup without involving her camp.

Insiders, however, say the balance of power in the 720-seat European legislature remains essentially unchanged from the last legislature. It lies with a centrist coalition made up of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), the biggest group with 189 seats, the leftist Socialists & Democrats (S&D) with 136, and the liberal Renew Europe group, which includes the French president’s party.

Yet a provisional parliament tally as of Friday had ECR, dominated by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, edging into third place with 83 seats, versus Renew’s 81. And Renew’s count was poised to shrink even further, after Czech party ANO – which has seven EU lawmakers – said Friday that it was leaving the group to seek a new home.

A Renew spokesman said it was not yet possible to say what number the group would end up with. Meanwhile, a source close to Renew said five lawmakers with the pan-European Volt party that it had been chasing had opted to join the Greens instead.

Numbers game

The final counts will be known by Wednesday, just ahead of an EU summit on Thursday and Friday which is meant to settle nominations for the European Commission, the European Council, and the bloc’s top foreign policy official.

A second term for the EPP’s Ursula von der Leyen as commission chief seems likely after leaders voiced broad agreement on her candidacy in Brussels this week – though she still needs backing from a majority in parliament.

The names put forward for the other jobs are former Portuguese prime minister Antonio Costa, of the S&D, for the European Council presidency; and Renew’s Kaja Kallas, the current Estonian premier, as the EU’s foreign policy “high representative.” Current European Parliament speaker Roberta Metsola, also from the EPP, is slated to stay on in her chair.

Yet attempts by the EPP to muscle in on the positions up for grabs and Meloni’s indignation at not having the ECR considered in the nominations have cast a cloud over the process. Although the far right did relatively well in the elections, it remains splintered into various factions in the parliament, with the ECR the biggest. Meloni, however, shows no sign of relenting. “The elections have clearly shifted Europe’s center of gravity to the right,” she told Il Giornale. “In the current parliament, on various dossiers, we will see that there can be a change in the subjects, in the priorities, in the way of reading some policies,” she said.

In the lead-up to the EU elections, von der Leyen courted Meloni as a way of covering her bases. However, the S&D has made it clear that any EPP-ECR alliance would cost her its support.