By Jack Kennedy
The European Parliament elections of 6-9 June shifted the chamber solidly to the right. As many commentators have noted, the gains of the far-right were less extensive than had been expected; however, they did make gains, as did the centre-right/right European People’s Party (EPP) grouping. This came largely at the expense of the liberal/centrist Renew Europe and the Greens.
What does this mean for peacebuilding and conflict prevention? It is difficult to say just yet, but the outlook is not positive. When it comes to shaping EU foreign policy, the European Parliament only plays a marginal role, as most of the power is concentrated in Member States’ hands and decisions are made at Council level. However, the new parliament will have two main avenues through which it can influence EU foreign policy. The first is the election of the Commission. Both the President of the Commission as an individual and the College of Commissioners as a whole – including the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) – are subject to parliamentary approval. The second is the budget: the EU’s will need a new Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) by 2028, and negotiations are set to begin next year.
Policy influence
Ursula von der Leyen wants to be re-elected and then pass a new MFF; with the Parliament as fractured as it is and her first election having been a close-run contest (receiving just 383 of the required 374 votes from MEPs), she will likely face an uphill battle in building her coalition. In the process, the far-right may be in a position to exert influence on the MFF and extract political concessions from the new Commission. Indeed, in 2019 Von der Leyen required the support from the far-right Fidesz and Law & Justice parties (of Hungary and Poland respectively) to be elected.
It is important to acknowledge that the far-right is not a monolith; as noted by Rosa Balfour and Sophia Besch last week. This diversity is especially evident on issues of foreign policy, because far-right parties are overwhelmingly focused on domestic grievances. As part of this inward-looking approach, as explained on a recent podcast from EPLO member the International Crisis Group, most far-right parties view foreign policy, particularly aid and development assistance, through a highly transactional lens. In this view, assistance and partnerships are not worth pursuing in the interest of the general stability and development of the world or because they’re intrinsically virtuous; they’re useful only if they can be leveraged in the immediate, short-term interest of the donor.
Additionally, Besch observes that the far-right of 2024 is not only more influential, it’s more extreme. A decade ago, that political space was dominated by “populist right” parties, whose positions are less well-defined or deeply-rooted, and who are more subject to moderation by exposure to the political mainstream. Now, we see comparatively more “radical right” parties, who are more strongly ideological and firmer in their beliefs.
Indeed, increasingly it is less that the mainstream is moderating the radical right, but that the radical right is shaping the mainstream. As Matthias Matthijs recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, even the more-moderate EPP, Von der Leyen’s own party, has swung notably to the right in the past few years “on immigration, agriculture, and clean energy”. As Besch puts it, we increasingly see “mainstream parties implementing the positions of the radical right”, particularly on immigration, for fear of haemorrhaging support. PICUM, of which several EPLO members are part, has argued that EU foreign and border policies in the present Commission are already aligned with many goals of such far-right parties.
This combination – the far-right directly gaining concessions while also exerting soft influence on centre-right/right parties – means that the new commission and the new MFF may reflect far-right priorities and outlooks to a notably greater extent than their predecessors. It is likely we will see an EU that is more inward-looking, more transactional, and more interested in what it can immediately get out of partnerships with other countries than collective and/or long-term benefit. If so, peacebuilding will suffer.
Bad timing
These election results are also, from the perspective of peacebuilding, badly timed. Firstly, serious commitment conflict-prevention has scarcely been more urgently needed. The 2024 Global Peace Index found that “many of the conditions that precede major conflicts are higher than they have been since the end of the Second World War”; global peacefulness has deteriorated for the past five years in a row.
Secondly, peacebuilding and conflict prevention initiatives have already been receiving steadily smaller proportions of rich countries’ (including the EU’s) aid spending with each successive year. An OECD report last year found that 2021 saw a fifteen-year record low for the share of official development assistance spent on peacebuilding. This trend has been explored in previous EPLO blog posts and is particularly true of EU countries, who together and collectively provide up a large proportion of global funding for peace.
Finally, there were indications even before the election that the EU was turning inward, increasingly thinking in a narrowly self-interested manner, and seeking to securitise its foreign policy. Two high-level planning documents from recent weeks offer hints at the thinking of member state leaders and senior EU bureaucrats. The first is the EU’s 2024-2029 Strategic Agenda, adopted by the European Council on 27th June (an outline of which leaked before the election). It does make gestures towards “efforts to promote global peace, justice and stability, as well as democracy, universal human rights and the [SDGs]” and “work to promote security, stability, peace and prosperity in our neighbourhood and beyond”, but significantly more emphasis is placed on traditional defence and “interests”. The document lays out plans for “increased defence spending, “reduce[d] strategic dependencies”, and “enhanced interoperability between European armed forces”. The Agenda also pledges to find “new ways to prevent and counter irregular migration [and] joint solutions to the security threat of instrumentalised migration”, as well as to “leverage both internal and external EU policies in the best interests of the Union”. It is no accident that peace, stability and human rights get approximately two references each throughout the document, whereas migration and defence each have an entire section of their own.
The second document was a leaked draft briefing book prepared by the Commission’s Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA). It describes such partnerships as a competition “for influence” in a “multipolar world”; in this “battle of offers”, the EU cannot “risk being sidelined”. It alleges that there was previously a tendency to “underestimate the significance for Europe’s direct interests of emerging markets and developing economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America”. The entire document is couched in terms of securing influence and reaping economic benefits: that “with the economy now serving as the battleground for geopolitical competition, the new College [of Commissioners] should redefine the focus of EU external action”.
The book reiterates several times that all global cooperation should have the aim of “delivering strategic autonomy” to Europe. “European business expects the EU to help reduce political and economic risks for business operation in African partner countries”, and there should be a general “move from grants to loans and investments”. Perhaps most tellingly, DG INTPA recommends that EU’s approach to global funds focus on three key aspects, two of which are “leverage” and visibility”. On the former, it says Europe’s investments “should actively contribute to advance EU objectives”, and any contribution of money to a fund “must come with a clear role in the governance of the Fund…to maximise leverage”. On the latter, it stresses the importance of publicising the EU’s funding efforts “to translate financial input into political output”.
These trends and the European election results should probably be read as symptoms of large, common, interrelated socio-political trends rather than distinct events. As discussed, sections of the political mainstream in Europe have for some time now been seeking to pre-empt the direction they believe public opinion to be moving, hence less peace funding, more demand for immediate economic and political gains from overseas engagement, and frequent promises to crack down on migration. Of course, this in turn serves to legitimise those ideas and may boost far-right parties as much as it outflanks them. Regardless, even if these developments ultimately have shared origins, they can still compound each other in destructive ways.
What is to be done?
In the immediate aftermath of the election, EPLO member Oxfam issued a call to action for the EU to prioritise, among other things, urgent climate action, safeguarding human rights in its foreign and security policy, and replacing a securitised approach to migration with a focus on the stabilisation and development of migrants’ origin countries. It also criticised an “increasingly transactional” approach to aid in which the EU seeks to serve “its own geopolitical and economic interests and relies more and more on the private sector”, urging the Commission to “reconsider this pivot”. More specifically related to peacebuilding, fellow member Search for Common Ground earlier called on politicians and voters to champion “a renewed commitment to peacebuilding and conflict prevention”, noting the scale and number of conflicts raging around the world and that such conflicts are the source of 80% of all need for humanitarian assistance.
This is the right message, and the two statements (and others like them) rightly convey a sense of urgency and depth of need. On a similar note, EPLO also published two letters: one calling on the Commission to leverage the Green Transition to build peace globally, and another urging MEPs to strengthen the EU’s role as a global promotor of peace. The question is, what concrete steps are needed to keep peacebuilding and conflict prevention a significant part of the EU’s external action?
For European politicians, the task is relatively straightforward: push hard for peacebuilding to be well-funded in the budget and a policy priority in the Commission and European External Action Service. There is a need for strong, courageous leadership on this issue; instead of building coalitions with or seeking to emulate the far-right, leaders can make a bold, positive case for an alternative. The fact that mainstream adoption of far-right policy positions has served mostly to further normalise them and strengthen the far-right them is proof that establishment politicians have as much power to shape public opinion as need to chase it. Given that, they should recognise European voters are smart, empathetic people, and that they can be convinced of the benefits and virtues of a foreign policy that is mutually beneficial rather than zero-sum. Instead of assuming the public can only ever be motivated by fear and self-interest, and thereby stoking those fears and encouraging that self-interest, leaders should present a cohesive vision for how things can be better.
Citizens and civil society organisations must push their representatives in this direction. When making this case, whether to politicians or to the wider public it is vital to remember that peacebuilding absolutely is in the EU’s own interest. Less conflict prevention means more wars, crises, and instability around the world; this in turn will impede the free flow of global trade, increase the number of people compelled to flee their homes and seek asylum elsewhere, and potentially directly endanger the security of European states. Such considerations shouldn’t be the main reason the EU supports peacebuilding (it is simply a moral imperative, doubly so for Europe given its colonial history) but they are worth pointing out. Turning inward out of short-term self-interest would, in the long term, hurt the EU.
In essence, it is a question of rejecting the easy option in the short term, and instead doing that which is morally necessary and universally beneficial in the long term. And if our leaders are either not courageous enough or unable to make a political case for that kind of trade-off now, how are we ever going to respond to the existential threat of the climate crisis?