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The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is preparing to face a rare vote of censure in the European parliament that is likely to reveal discontent about the rightward drift of EU policies.
Von der Leyen is expected to comfortably survive a vote on Thursday on the censure motion, which in theory could trigger the downfall of her commission. While her survival is considered a certainty, the debate has lifted the lid on simmering discontent among centrist, centre-left and green MEPs who voted her back into office just under one year ago, after elections that gave rightwing nationalists their best-ever results.
The motion of censure – tabled by the far-right, vaccine-sceptic Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea – is ostensibly about von der Leyen’s refusal to release text messages exchanged with the Pfizer chief executive at the height of the Covid pandemic. Her stonewalling on the SMS messages has been condemned by the EU’s highest court and described as “maladministration” by an independent watchdog.
The motion also includes criticism of the EU’s Covid recovery funds and the legal basis of a €150bn (£129bn) defence fund, as well as unsubstantiated claims of interference in recent elections in Germany and Romania.
Piperea’s text won the backing of 76 like-minded nationalists and extremists, clearing the 10% threshold required to get on the agenda.
In a pugnacious performance at the European parliament on Monday, von der Leyen derided “false claims about election meddling” and attempts to “rewrite history” on “how Europe successfully overcame a global pandemic together”.
During her speech she cast the motion squarely as part of “an age of struggle between democracy and illiberalism”. Referring to extremist parties “fuelled by conspiracies, from anti-vaxxers to Putin apologists”, she said: “And you only have to look at some of the signatories of this motion to understand what I mean.”
But behind the scenes, her officials are worried that a large number of no-shows and abstentions from mainstream groups could damage her standing in the vote. Sophia Russack, a political scientist at the Centre for European Policy Studies, said abstentions would be a clear signal of disagreement with her way of doing politics: “While she will survive, that is clear, it is an interesting case because it is not at all about Pfizer. It is a proxy war.”
Barely one year ago, after the European elections, von der Leyen was re-elected to a second term as European Commission president, backed by mainstream political forces: the centre-right, centre-left, centrists and greens. But these traditional groups mostly lost ground to rightwing nationalists, who attained their strongest results.
Von der Leyen’s group, the centre-right European People’s party, which slightly improved its vote share in the 2024 European elections, has voiced its staunch support. “We will unanimously vote against this on Thursday,” said the EPP group leader, Manfred Weber.
While the Socialists and Democrats have said they will not support the motion, it is unclear how many will abstain. The S&D leader, Iratxe García Pérez, has described the motion as a “reactionary assault” on European politics, but also claimed it was a result of the EPP’s “totally misguided strategy in the European parliament”. She referred to occasions when the centre right voted with the far right, for instance to block an EU ethics body, delay environmental reporting legislation and campaign against Green NGOs.
The centrist Renew group is also expected to have some abstentions. One of its Irish members, Barry Andrews of Fianna Fáil, has already announced he will abstain, having accused the commission of inaction in defending the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression.
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Weber has defended the EPP’s record, claiming that his group voted with the mainstream groups “90% of the time”, but that the platform that voted von der Leyen into office was never intended to be a coalition. He said the EPP’s decision to call for the scrapping of recent EU anti-greenwashing proposals – a move supported by the far right – was not “misusing democracy, [but] “shows different identities in our house”.
In her speech on Monday, von der Leyen appeared to hint at her disagreement with Socialist critics, saying: “The answer can never be to complain about how people voted.” While she promised to work for compromise, her olive branch was slender and nonspecific. “I cannot promise that we will always agree on everything in the future,” she said.
Russack said: “What this vote will actually be about is about their [Socialist] unhappiness about how she and Weber are building new majorities that exclude them and include those that they [the Socialists] think are dangerous for European democracy.”
The last motion of censure against a commission president was tabled against Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014 over the LuxLeaks scandal. The parliament has never passed a motion of censure, but in 1999 such a threat triggered the resignation of the entire commission led by Jacques Santer, after a fraud and corruption scandal.
A quarter of a century later, the EU is facing a much more turbulent world, from the war in Ukraine, to the climate crisis and a possible trade war with Donald Trump’s US.
Von der Leyen appealed to MEPs to keep that in mind: “Strength only comes through unity.”
