The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has survived a rare vote of censure in the European parliament, but faces calls to reverse the rightward drift of EU policies.
Von der Leyen was always expected to comfortably survive the censure motion vote on Thursday, which in theory could have triggered the downfall of her commission. In the end 175 MEPs voted for the motion, 360 against and 18 abstained, on a turnout of 77% of the 720-strong parliament.
But the debate 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 – was 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 included 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. That support was significantly boosted in the vote, when 175 MEPs voted for his motion, nearly 25% of the parliament’s members, reflecting the record-breaking numbers of nationalists and far-right MEPs elected in 2024.
Despite averting a high abstention tally, many MEPs apparently chose not to vote. Soon after the motion on von der Leyen, 636 MEPs took part in a separate vote, a turnout of 88%, meaning it was highly likely that many were in the chamber but declined to vote.
Crucial to von der Leyen’s victory was the last-minute decision by socialists in the European parliament to vote against the motion, rather than abstain. While the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the second-largest group in the European parliament, had always said its MEPs would not support a far-right motion, many of them had flirted with abstaining to express their discontent with what they see as von der Leyen’s rightward drift.
Announcing the decision to reject the motion, the S&D leader, Iratxe García Pérez, said “dismantling the commission in the midst of geopolitical crisis would be completely irresponsible”. But she accused von der Leyen of shifting towards “far-right pledges” and said trust had been badly damaged.
She urged the commission president to show commitment “to our priorities … economy together, social growth, social justice and green transition”.
García Pérez has highlighted decisions by von der Leyen’s centre- right European People’s party (EPP) to vote with the far right, for instance to block an EU ethics body, delay environmental reporting legislation and campaign against Green NGOs.
Von der Leyen was not present in the Strasbourg chamber on Thursday, instead taking part in a conference in Rome on the reconstruction of Ukraine. In a tweet soon after the vote that did not reference the motion, she expressed thanks: “In a moment of global volatility and unpredictability, the EU needs strength, vision and the capacity to act.”
Earlier this week she derided “false claims about election meddling” and attempts to “rewrite history” on “how Europe successfully overcame a global pandemic together”.
During a debate on Monday 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 had 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.
The EPP, which slightly improved its vote share in the 2024 European elections, had voiced its staunch support.
The centrist Renew group had a handful of abstentions. One of its Irish members, Barry Andrews of Fianna Fáil, abstained, having accused the commission of inaction in defending the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression.
Manfred Weber, the EPP group leader, has defended its 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.
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.
