EU voters head to the polls on June 6-9 to elect the next European Parliament with the 27-member bloc facing a daunting set of challenges, including deep divisions over migration management, a backlash against climate change policies, and an overhaul of Europe’s defence industries spurred by the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Some 373 million voters across 27 countries are eligible to elect representatives in the European Parliament starting on Thursday, in the world’s second largest exercise in democracy after the recent election in India.
Long regarded as the weakest of the EU’s three main institutions, the 720-member parliament has seen its powers increase in recent years, not least in shaping the all-important EU budget. Among its first tasks will be to confirm the 27 members of the European Commission, including its presidency, a position currently held by Ursula von der Leyen, who is running for a second term.
The jockeying for positions will provide an early indicator of the balance of power and shifting alliances between political groups in the assembly – and how these may shape EU policy over the coming five years. Here's a look at three topics that dominated discussions over the past legislature and are set to remain high on the agenda in the years ahead.
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A pivotal vote for Europe’s Green Deal
The upcoming European polls could prove to be a make-or-break election for von der Leyen's ambitious Green Deal, a trailblazing initiative that notched up several landmark wins before stalling over the past year amid a backlash against environmental policies.
“Even if it falls short of the necessary trajectory, the European Green Pact is to date the most ambitious plan ever adopted for the climate and the environment,” says Caroline François-Marsal, Europe Manager at the Climate Action Network, a global network of NGOs pushing for green policies.
Von der Leyen unveiled her flagship policy proposal in late 2019, just days into the EU’s top job, with the stated aim of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The plan’s rollout came at an auspicious time for climate activism, on the back of a Green surge in European elections and with “Friday for climate” protests sweeping European cities.
“Back then, all the major political groups wanted to put the environment at the centre of the agenda, including von der Leyen’s European People's Party (EPP), which had not previously prioritised such topics,” says François-Marsal.
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The first two years of the legislature witnessed a flurry of climate initiatives, culminating in the “Fit for 55” package of measures designed to reduce the EU's greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. Landmark legislation enacted by the European Parliament includes the phase-out of combustion-powered cars, a ban on imports from deforested areas and the introduction of a carbon border tax.
But further initiatives have faced strong headwinds, with the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine effectively throwing a spanner in the works amid an unprecedented energy crisis and galloping inflation.
The Green Deal suffered a symbolic defeat earlier this year when von der Leyen withdrew an ambitious plan to slash by half the use of pesticides in agriculture by 2030, which right-wing parties had already stalled in the European Parliament. The move followed widespread protests by farmers complaining about the burden created by environmental regulation.
With polls predicting a breakthrough for Europe's far-right parties in the upcoming elections, and a setback for the Greens, experts warn the future of von der Leyen’s flagship policy could be on the line in the June 6-9 vote – with key provisions still awaiting funding and implementation.
“In France, the far right has made it clear that it wants to get rid of the Green Deal,” says François-Marsal. “Depending on the result of the vote, we could see some of the measures taken during this mandate cancelled or projects aborted. That would be catastrophic at a time when we urgently need to speed up the ecological transition.”
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Outsourcing Europe’s migration control
Over the past decade, few topics have proved as divisive as migration and asylum policy, testing the unity and solidarity that is meant to underpin the 27-member bloc. A surge in support for far-right parties in the June 6-9 polls is likely to bolster calls for more barriers to immigration, while further straining the principle of solidarity between members.
The EU’s current migratory policy is rooted in the massive influx of migrants and refugees triggered by the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria, which resulted in more than 2.3 million crossings between 2015 and 2016.
“The migrant crisis reinforced the perception of a threat and accentuated the inward-looking attitude of member states, with a desire to protect themselves by reintroducing border controls, including within the Schengen area,” says Barbou des Places, a law professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and head of the EUROLAB research centre.
In 2016, the EU struck a deal with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants, agreeing to pay €6 billion in EU funds in return for a Turkish pledge to slow down irregular migration and take back illegal migrants. While human rights groups slammed the agreement with Ankara, the model has been duplicated in recent years, first with Libya (2017), then with Tunisia (2023), and finally with Mauritania and Egypt earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the EU has doubled the annual budget allocated to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, commonly known as Frontex, to €900 million, with the aim of having a permanent contingent of 10,000 border and coast guards by 2027.
Earlier this year, EU lawmakers adopted the New Pact on Immigration and Asylum, which sets up a procedure to “filter” migrants at the EU’s borders and turn back those with a low chance of obtaining asylum. While it upholds the so-called Dublin Regulation – whereby the first EU country of entry is responsible for examining asylum applications – the pact also requires that countries with fewer applicants either agree to take more in or make a financial or material contribution to those with the highest number.
The pact required almost four years of tough negotiations. But just days after its adoption, 15 member states sent a letter to the European Commission calling for tougher measures, urging it to develop the outsourcing of migration and asylum policy to neighbouring countries.
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“Many countries believe the EU’s migration policy is still not hard enough,” says Barbou des Places, for whom “immigration will remain a key issue in the next parliamentary term, with a clear divide between left and right”.
Critics say a consequence of the focus on irregular migrants has been the sidelining of legal immigration, which remains by far the most massive with more than three million new arrivals each year. It will be up to the next EU legislature to tackle this issue, even as it faces more heated debates on the outsourcing of migration procedures, border controls, and solidarity between member states.
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Ukraine war spurs defence overhaul
Defence policy has long been a weak link in the European project, left out by nation states eager to control their armies and diplomacies. But all that has changed with the advent of war on the bloc’s eastern border, and amid fears of a possible American disengagement from the continent.
“The war in Ukraine represents a turning point, a paradigm shift in European defence, since decisions on greater cooperation were taken very quickly after Russia’s invasion,” says Elsa Bernard, an EU defence specialist at the University of Lille in northern France.
The war has made EU members “acutely aware of their shortcomings in terms of defence capabilities and equipment, and of the need to strengthen Europe’s industrial and technological base – not only to renew national stocks, but also to supply arms to Ukraine", she adds.
The focus on industry and research, which fall under the remit of the European Commission and Parliament, has allowed the two supranational institutions to step up their role in shaping the bloc’s defence policy in the decade since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
After years of debate, the EU's security strategy finally turned a corner in 2021 with the joint establishment of the European Defence Fund (EDF), designed to encourage collaborative, cross-border research and development in the area of defence, and the European Peace Facility (EPF), which finances the EU’s external operations, including military operations in third countries and the supply of military equipment.
The latter fund has seen its budget increase more than threefold since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, financing the shipment of arms and munitions to Ukraine by reimbursing their cost to the supplier countries.
“There is thus a form of solidarity, since even states that do not directly send arms or munitions to Ukraine are indirectly participating by funding the FEP,” says Bernard.
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The threat from Moscow has spurred efforts to overhaul European arms manufacturing and reduce wasteful fragmentation in a bloc whose members use 17 different battle tanks when the United States has just one.
True to form, the EU has responded with a fresh arsenal of acronyms. One is the European Defence Industry Reinforcement through common Procurement Act (EDIRPA), which offers incentives for countries to procure weapons jointly. Another is the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), which aims to ramp up ammunition production capacity to 2 million shells annually by the end of 2025.
While EDIRPA and ASAP are both short-term regulations, the European Commission has already proposed a long-term framework – dubbed the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) – aimed at “investing more, better, together and Europe-wide”, and reducing the share of weapons purchased from non-EU contractors.
Turning EDIS into reality “will be a key challenge for the next Commission and the next European Parliament,” says Bernard, noting that the EU is yet to find funding for its long-term strategy. “In this respect, the negotiations on the next seven-year (2028-2034) EU budget will be decisive,” he adds.
A change in the balance of power in Brussels could add uncertainty to those negotiations, though experts have played down the impact of a possible surge in far-right parties, noting that deep divisions over NATO, Russia and support for Ukraine are likely to dilute their influence in the European Parliament.
