The EU Parliament Election Results Explained

this video is brought to you by brilliant last weekend nearly 200 million Europeans went to the polls to elect the 720 members of the European Parliament going into the election the big story was about how the polls were predicting a surge for the soall far right but while the right did make gains their success was mostly driven by electoral Dynamics in just a couple of countries notably France and Germany and the overall picture was complicated by a more General fragmentation of European politics so in this video we're going to take a look at what happened at last weekend's election why it was a good result for the right at least in some countries and what might happen [Music] next before we start if you haven't already please consider subscribing and ringing the bell to stay in the loop and be notified when we release new videos so let's start with a bit of context because European elections are relatively complicated between June the 6th and June the 9th 27 EU countries went to the polls to elect the 720 members of the European Parliament that's 15 more MEPS than in 2019 but less than the 751 MEPS who are in the parliament before brexit these 720 seats are a portioned roughly relative to each country's population size although smaller EU member states generally get slightly more seats per capita France Germany Spain and Italy for instance all have around 800,000 people per MEP while the EU smallest members namely Estonia Cyprus Luxembourg and Malta all have less than 200,000 people per MEP nonetheless the big EU countries still have by far in way the most seats in the parliament which means that what can look like european-wide Trends are sometimes actually just country-level trends for instance it looks like the renew group lost a fair number of seats this time round but this is mainly because of macron's Renaissance Le Coalition which has become significantly less popular since the last European elections in 2019 anyway the other important thing to understand is that MEPS and their parties usually form larger European level groups which include more than one European party MEPS are incentivized to organize intergroups for a variety of reasons not only is there a political advantage to working together with likeminded colleagues but groups also have some formal privileges within the parliament including a staff allocation and financial subsidies a group must have at least 23 MEPS from at least seven different member states currently there are seven groups in the chamber from left to right these are the left the green European free Alliance the Socialists and Democrats renew Europe the European People's Party the European conservatives and reformists and identity and democracy groups elect MEP leaders who enjoy certain procedural Powers but the deao leader is usually the leader of the biggest party within that group for example Georgia Maloney is widely considered the deao leader of the ECR while macron is widely considered the deao leader of renew anyway going into the election the composition of the European Parliament was as follows the EP had 176 MEPS the Socialists and Democrats had 139 R new had 102 the greens had 71 the ECR had 69 identity and democracy had 49 the left had 37 and the remaining 62 MEPS were what's known as non-inscrits I.E without a group according to current projections as of Monday morning after this weekend's elections this is how things have changed the EP won eight more seats taking their total to 184 the Socialists and Democrats have maintained the same number of MEPS with 139 although because the parliament has grown in sign this means that their share of MEPS has slightly Fallen renew have lost 22 MEPS taking their total to 80 the ECR won four more seats taking their total to 73 identity and democracy won nine more seats taking their total to 58 the greens lost 19 seats taking their total to 52 the left lost one seat taking their total to 36 and the number of non- inscrip MEPS Rose by 36 for a total of 98 now in general we should should be wary of drawing definite conclusions from these results because voters in different countries treat these elections very differently in some countries European elections are treated as distinctly European with voters supporting parties that they think best affect their preferred EU level policies in others EU elections are treated as essentially domestic affairs with voters using them to express satisfaction or disatisfaction with their incumbent national government and in some countries there's very little interest in Europe elections at all which is sort of understandable given that according to various studies a large number of European citizens neither care about them nor understand them nonetheless there are at least two pretty clear trends at the European level the first is fragmentation this is most obviously apparent in both the fact that only the EP has more than 20% of all MEPS and we now have four groups with between 50 and 80 MEPS but also in the number of non- inscrit meeps which has increased dramatically there's also been fragmentation within and between groups as we've covered in a previous video the European right is divided on a variety of issues including Ukraine and European integration but the European Center is also increasingly divided for instance the Coalition that backed V delain in 2019 which mostly comprised the ep the Socialists and Democrats and renew is increasingly divided over stuff like the green New Deal immigration and further the European expansion this means that even though they collectively won a majority governing would be more difficult this time around the second is a shift to the right every group to the right of renew won seats while every group to the left of and including renew saw their share of MEPS decrease with an especially sharp drop for both renew and the greens it's also worth noting that the non- inscrip group mostly included parties on the European right like Germany's afd hungary's fides and po Confederation who could plausibly join or cooperate with either identity and democracy or the ECR in the future or even form their own new group interestingly a lot of this was driven by electoral Dynamics in France and Germany the riot actually underperformed the polls in a whole load of countries including Belgium Poland and Sweden in Italy while Malone's Fratelli ditalia did impressively well with 29% of the vote she mostly stole votes from other right-wing parties and the combined vote share of tell dalala and Lega was unchanged on 2019 however the Wright did especially well in France and Germany in France Marine leen's romont National won a 31% plurality more than double that of macron's Renaissance Le Coalition who only just beat the Socialists macron's collapse also mostly explains why renew lost so many seats and the appalling results provoked him into calling snap elections essentially daring the French electorate to actually put Leen in power in Germany not only did the center-right Christian democrats come first with a massive 30% plurality but despite a series of scandals the farri right afd also came second beating Schultz's social Democrats by a couple of percentage points this was a truly terrible night for Germany's governing Coalition with all three parties losing significant ground on 2019 similarly green and far-left parties actually outperform the polls in a handful of European countries including the Netherlands Sweden Denmark and Finland but their gains here were more than offset by the collapse of the French and German greens who both saw their vote share roughly hared compared to 2019 all in all while the right definitely performed well the aggregate number disguises some pretty significant intra-european variation and The parliament's Wider fragmentation promises to make governing and choosing a new commission president remarkably difficult so subscribe to stay updated with with the upcoming chaos now understanding exactly what has or is going to happen here can be a little tricky requiring you to evaluate lots of information from different often partial sources it would be sensible then to begin improving your critical thinking skills so that you can keep sharp and better understand what's going on and well our sponsor brilliant.org can help you do just that brilliant is the online learning platform that's designed specifically to teach you everything from maths data analysis programming and AI from the ground up you don't need a fancy degree or to have dedicated hundreds of hours to studying any of these all you need is a device with an internet connection and a few spare minutes a day and with your spare few minutes you'll learn by actually doing with brilliant providing Hands-On lessons that let you play around with Concepts a method that has been shown to be six times more effective than just watching lectures what makes this even better is that this content is created by an 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Channel: TLDR News EU

Views: 565,408

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Id: 1Oeruxq4BB0

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024