When the centre looks right: Europe’s changing political balance

Opinion eueuropean parliamentEuropean Union When the centre looks right: Europe’s changing political balance File Photo: Plenary Session At The European Parliament In Starsbourg Relevant News Quiet diplomacy convinces Serbian festival to withdraw from Kyrenia 21 August 2026 When the centre looks right: Europe’s changing political balance 21 August 2026 Cavo Greco monastery legalisation battle moves to deviations council 21 August 2026 Theodosis Pipis 21 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber The European Union was born from the conviction that Europe could not safely return to a system in which national power operated without common constraints. After two devastating wars, European states chose to share power across borders and submit themselves to rules that none of them could control alone. European integration was therefore not simply an economic project. It was also an attempt to make the concentration and abuse of political power harder to achieve. The European Parliament is central to that system. It is the EU’s directly elected institution, with 720 Members of the European Parliament elected for the 2024–29 term, representing hundreds of millions of European citizens. Parliament shares legislative power with the Council, elects the president of the European Commission and can force the Commission to resign through a motion of censure. For much of the Parliament’s history, its politics have been shaped by a broad pro-European centre. The European People’s Party (EPP), Socialists and Democrats (S&D), liberals in Renew Europe and, on many issues, the Greens have provided the political majority behind European integration, the rule of law and the institutions of the Union. This has never been a formal coalition in the traditional national sense, and voting alliances have always shifted from issue to issue. But there has nevertheless been a relatively clear political centre of gravity in the Parliament. That centre is now becoming more fluid. The EPP has not formally abandoned its cooperation with the centre. Instead, it increasingly appears willing to treat parliamentary majorities as transactional: relying on the centre when it needs to control the Parliament’s institutions, while turning further to the right when it wants to pass more conservative legislation. The question is not simply whether the EPP has “moved right”. Nor is every party to its right politically identical. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), Patriots for Europe (PfE) and Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) represent different strands of the European far-right, with different positions on European integration and democratic institutions. But the growing willingness of the EPP to cooperate with these groups, particularly PfE and ESN, marks a change in what is considered an acceptable parliamentary alliance. Since the beginning of the current parliamentary term, the EPP has increasingly been able to rely on ECR, PfE and, on some occasions, ESN when its traditional partners in S&D, Renew and the Greens have opposed its position. One early indication came in October 2024, when EPP lawmakers joined ECR, PfE and ESN in supporting a non-binding resolution recognising Venezuela’s opposition leader Edmundo González as the country’s president-elect. On its own, the vote did not demonstrate the emergence of a new governing coalition. Foreign-policy resolutions frequently produce unusual alliances. But it was an early indication of how the parliamentary arithmetic could extend beyond the traditional centre. The pattern became more consequential in 2025. In June, the EPP joined ECR and Patriots for Europe in establishing a parliamentary working group to scrutinise EU funding for non-governmental organisations (NGOs), despite opposition from the S&D, Renew, The Left and the Greens. The significance of the vote was not simply the subject of the working group, but the coalition behind it. This was a major decision in Parliament and became possible due to the EPP being able to look beyond its traditional centrist partners. But the most consequential example is the EU’s sustainability and corporate due-diligence rules. For years, the European Union had moved towards expanding the obligations placed on large companies to disclose their environmental and social impact and to identify and address abuses in their supply chains. The underlying principle was straightforward: companies operating across borders should not be able to distance themselves from the consequences of their activities simply because those consequences occur elsewhere in the supply chain. That direction has increasingly been recast as a question of European competitiveness. Under the Commission’s 2025 Omnibus simplification agenda, Parliament backed a substantial narrowing of the EU’s sustainability reporting and corporate due-diligence framework. In December 2025, MEPs voted 428–218 in favour of Parliament’s position. The eventual legislation, approved by the Council in February 2026, reduced the scope of mandatory sustainability reporting to companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in annual turnover. Mandatory due-diligence requirements were narrowed further, applying only to companies with more than 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in annual turnover. The significance of this change is not simply that fewer companies will face obligations. It is that the political balance over what the European Union should demand from business has changed. The old approach increasingly treated corporate power as something that needed to be constrained through common European rules. The new approach places much greater emphasis on the cost of those rules to companies and on the need to reduce regulatory burdens in the name of competitiveness. There are legitimate arguments for that shift. European businesses do face significant regulatory and economic pressures, and EU legislation can impose real administrative costs. Simplifying rules does not automatically mean weakening democracy, human rights or environmental protection. But the political question that arises is what happens when simplification becomes the dominant principle through which the EU evaluates its own rules. The Omnibus legislation demonstrates that this is no longer simply a theoretical change in political rhetoric. It became law after winning broad parliamentary support. And the parliamentary majority behind it illustrates the importance of the EPP’s increasingly flexible approach to alliances. For decades, the European Parliament’s broad pro-European consensus helped establish a political boundary around the far right. Parties further to the right could win elections, enter Parliament and influence debate, but they remained largely outside the central coalition through which European institutions were governed. The deeper concern is what happens when cooperation with parties once treated as politically marginal becomes routine. When the EPP can rely on S&D, Renew and the Greens to control the Parliament’s institutions, but then turn to ECR, PfE or ESN when it wants to win a contested policy battle, the political centre becomes less of a governing coalition and more of a resource to be used out of convenience. 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