The earlier target represents a loss for the German Greens who, ahead of a three-day party congress in Lyon this weekend, had pushed for the climate neutrality target to be delayed to 2045, according to amendments seen by POLITICO.
The election manifesto, which was adopted by a large majority of national delegations, warned that meeting these climate objectives “must not rely on false solutions such as geo-engineering.”
The Greens are at risk of losing about a third of their seats in the European Parliament at the EU election in June, while a backlash against Brussels’ green agenda has been sweeping across the Continent in recent weeks. The party’s response has been to redouble the push on its core demands for higher climate ambition.
The final manifesto, for example, calls for the EU energy system to rely on 100 percent renewable sources and to phase out all fossil fuels by 2040, “starting with coal by 2030.” It also calls on the EU to adopt a plan for phasing out “fossil gas and oil as early as 2035 and no later than 2040.”
That point is another loss for the German Greens, who had pushed for deleting phaseout dates for fossil gas and oil from the manifesto.
The Greens have also been fighting back against the conservatives’ and far right’s attacks blaming them for farmers’ current struggles and for forcing the green transition to quickly on the sector.
Over the weekend, the Greens amended their manifesto to respond to farmers’ discontent, saying they will campaign for “a new agricultural model that reduces emissions, protect the environment, and foster social justice.”
The text insists that “farmers should make a decent income of their work,” and that the Greens will push to “make sure farmers are not exposed to unfair competition from products not respecting the same standards, including those imported from third countries” — which have been key demands of farmers’ unions during the recent demonstrations.
A CORPSE IN THE DANUBE AND A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE might sound more like elements from a film noir than an explanation of what’s happening in Europe today. But to understand the tortured state of the Continent’s politics, there’s no better place to start.
In October, the body of Christian Pilnacek, once the most powerful man in the Austrian justice ministry, was found floating in the river not far from the town of Krems, dead of an apparent suicide a few hours after he’d been arrested on a DUI after driving in the wrong direction on the highway.
“His life was taken from him,” the civil servant’s widow, a top prosecutor, told a memorial service in November, in a bitter swipe at the country’s political elites.
Pilnacek, a dapper civil servant who counted as one of his country’s best legal minds, had spent the preceding years battling a series of allegations that he had leaked privileged information to his political cronies and the press and had tried to quash a sweeping corruption investigation surrounding Vienna’s purchase of fighter jets.
In the wake of his death, however, it seemed that it wasn’t a guilty conscience that pushed him over the brink, but a refusal to bend his principles to the will of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), a bulwark of the country’s political system that has been part of the federal government without interruption since 1987.
A month after his body was found, a surreptitious recording of Pilnacek emerged, in which he could be heard describing how senior politicians in the ÖVP, the party of former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, had pressured him to kill investigations into political corruption.
“ÖVP ministers came to me even after there had been a search of the party headquarters and asked why I won’t shut it down,” Pilnacek, a gregarious man who enjoyed a good gossip, can be heard saying on the recording. “I always told them: I can’t do it, I won’t do it, I don’t want to do it.”
Facing his own legal troubles and feeling unjustly accused, he had turned to those same politicians for help — only to have been refused because the distraught civil servant hadn’t been effective in halting the other investigations.
“When I asked if they would do something to support me, the response was: ‘You were never really with us,’” Pilnacek says on the tape, which was recorded without his knowledge at a Vienna restaurant a few months before his death.
Even for a society steeled by decades of political scandal and corruption, the episode was jaw-dropping, prompting loud calls for a reckoning.
It’ll have to wait. For many Austrian voters, the biggest shocker surrounding the affair was the ÖVP’s reaction to the revelations. Instead of dissolving the government and triggering a new election, leaders of the center-right party went on the attack, accusing their political enemies of intrigue and using “KGB methods” to undermine the party.
“It’s not acceptable for our country to turn into a state of snitches,” ÖVP General Secretary Christian Stocker warned.
Christian Pilnacek during the trial of Johann Fuchs, the head of the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2022. Fuchs was alleged to have breached official secrecy and given false testimony before the Ibiza-U Committee | Johann Groder/EXPA via Belga
It was, in effect, a concession to his opponents, especially on the far right. In attempting to lead Austrians down a conspiracy rabbit hole instead of coming clean, Stocker was resorting to the very populist tactics his party had for years insisted were beneath it.
Far right rising
AS EUROPE FACES ITS MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION YEAR in living memory, the Continent is in for another round of soul-searching about the reasons behind the rise of the far right and other anti-establishment forces.
There are, of course, a variety of factors. Depending on the party and the country, they range from a sharp rise in migration to resentment over how establishment parties managed the pandemic to the European Union’s support for Ukraine and concerns over the war in Gaza.
But there’s another potent driver that’s far less often discussed: a wave of corruption scandals that has washed over Europe’s political establishment in recent years, providing ample grist for far-right parties that cast “the system” as hopelessly crooked and engineered to harm “normal” people.
While most far-right parties have their own issues with corruption and graft, voters tend to be more forgiving of their crimes, often because they consider the entire political class to be untrustworthy and are attracted to the parties’ often radical (if unrealistic) prescriptions for solving political problems.
Austria — home to the Freedom Party (FPÖ), a group founded in the 1950s by a former SS general — is poised to see the most dramatic rightward shift. The Pilnacek affair marks just the latest in a string of scandals that have exposed systemic corruption in the governing ÖVP, buoying the FPÖ, which has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls for more than a year.
With the European Parliament election in June and a national poll expected in the fall, the far-right party’s rise could have a substantial impact on the Continent’s politics. Austria, by virtue of its history and position at the crossroads of Europe, has often served as a proving ground for political movements. It was here, for example, that both the political antisemitism that inspired Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl’s Zionist movement were born.
More recently, it has served as a laboratory for the anti-immigrant far right, which under the FPÖ is poised to record one of its greatest victories yet.
Party leader Herbert Kickl — a hard-right ideologue who has vowed to halt both Ukraine’s EU accession and the sanctions the bloc has imposed on Russia — may soon be sitting in the Council alongside the EU’s bête noire, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whom Kickl has described as a role model.
At a packed rally near the southern Austrian city of Graz last weekend, Kickl called for an “EU of the fatherlands,” pledging to “defend Austria’s interests” alongside allies like the Hungarian leader.
“The technical term at the European level is ‘veto,’” Kickl told the enthusiastic crowd, which sat at long beer hall tables sipping mugs of lager. Kickl took the stage amid a flurry of fireworks as the theme music from the film “Hercules” played in the background. Throughout his hourlong address, audience members, many wearing lederhosen and other traditional Alpine garb, interrupted his remarks with loud chants of “Herbert, Herbert!”
“They can’t stop us,” Kickl said at one point during the show, dismissing Karl Nehammer, the current ÖVP chancellor, as a “dead man walking.”
Chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) Herbert Kickl | Alex Halada/AFP via Getty Images
Nehammer’s ÖVP is currently polling in third place behind the FPÖ and the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and his personal ratings are the lowest ever recorded for a chancellor, with more than 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll saying they had no confidence in him.
To be fair, he’s the second man to inherit the job after Kurz’s 2021 resignation and had only limited political experience. Recent campaigns by his image makers to boost his standing, such as one on the virtues of eating schnitzel, have fallen flat. His reputation was further undermined in September following the release of a video of a small party gathering in Salzburg, where he suggested poor people go to McDonald’s if they want a hot meal for their children.
Kickl’s momentum has created a bigger worry for Europe: A big win by the FPÖ could fuel support for its German sister party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is already in second place, polling at more than 20 percent.
Corruptus delicti
CORRUPTION AND POLITICS HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED hand-in-glove, but the topic has gained new-found relevance as scandals have rocked many of Europe’s once-dominant centrist parties from France to Italy to Greece, pushing some to the brink of extinction.
After years of corruption investigations and prosecutions involving former President Nicolas Sarkozy and other leading figures, for example, France’s once-dominant center right finished with less than 5 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2022.
In Spain, the center-right Popular Party (PP) is still suffering from a sweeping corruption case that led to the conviction of 29 people, including senior party officials, in 2018.
The problem is even worse in Central Europe, where a culture of corruption amongst the political mainstream in countries such as the Czech Republic has fueled the rise of populists such as Andrej Babiš, who won power on a promise to clean up the system in 2017 only to face an investigation into fraud allegations himself.
And in Brussels, the Qatargate cash-for-influence case has rocked the European Parliament with the biggest corruption scandal to hit the European institutions for decades.
In contrast to far-right parties, which often bounce back from scandal under new leadership on the power of their radical rhetoric, mainstream parties have a more difficult time — in large part because it’s often not clear what they stand for. After World War II, Europe’s center-right and center-left blocs served distinct clienteles: the professional and working classes, usually with strong ties to other interest groups such as farmers and churches.
These days, however, the differences between the blocs are often difficult to discern. With voter preference often influenced more by personality than substance, allegiance to the parties has frayed.
When it comes to corruption, Austria — a country of nearly 9 million people situated in the center of the Continent — stands apart: Its scandals are literally the stuff of Netflix series.
The country’s center-right and center-left parties (ÖVP and SPÖ) have dominated the country’s politics since WWII. That success created a system of clientelism and patronage, however, that is in the process of disintegrating following a series of investigations and court trials.
Investigators explored allegations that Eurofighter lobbyists paid about €100 million to Austrian politicians in exchange for the country’s €2 billion order of fighter jets in 2003 | Johannes Simon/Getty Images
In the 1970s, the Lucona affair involved a scheme hatched by a politically connected coffee-house owner named Udo Proksch. His plan involved blowing up a tanker he’d purchased to collect the insurance. Six people were killed in the explosion near the Maldives in 1977 sinking the tanker. Subsequent investigations into Proksch’s political links led to the resignation of 16 officials, including the president of the Austrian parliament, which under the constitution counts as the second-highest office, and the interior minister. The episode was later made into a movie.
The so-called Noricum Affair in the 1980s involved the illegal sale of hundreds of howitzers by an Austrian arms maker to both Iran and Iraq, which were engaged in a war against one another at the time. It, too, exposed close links between the politicians and illicit business interests. Cleaning up was more straightforward because the same politicians at the center of the affair had already been implicated in the Lucona scandal.
More recently, investigators explored allegations that Eurofighter lobbyists paid about €100 million to Austrian politicians in exchange for the country’s €2 billion order of fighter jets in 2003. In 2019, Pilnacek told colleagues in a meeting that he would “turn a blind eye” if they quietly shut down the investigation, arguing that it wasn’t winnable. That sparked a probe against him for alleged abuse of his office, which was later shelved.
After a more than decade-long investigation, prosecutors filed charges in June against two executives involved in the Eurofighter deal, alleging money laundering. The chances for convictions are murky, however. Despite ample evidence that the lobbyists paid out bribes, the only convictions in the case so far have been across the border in Germany.
Turnaround
IT’S IRONIC, GIVEN KICKL’S FOCUS ON STATE CORRUPTION, that the Austrian scandal to beat all scandals (which inspired both a miniseries and a separate documentary) involved not one of the centrist establishment parties but the FPÖ itself.
Named after the Spanish island of Ibiza, it was the result of a 2017 sting by a private investigator and his female companion, who was posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch.
Together, they lured Heinz-Christian Strache, then the FPÖ leader, and an associate of his to a villa on the island. They had outfitted the house with hidden cameras. Over the course of a long evening fueled by an endless supply of cigarettes and vodka mixed with Red Bull, Strache — who at the time was not in government — offered to trade influence for financial support.
By the time the video of the encounter was leaked in mid-2019, Strache was vice chancellor in a government led by the ÖVP’s Kurz.
The affair triggered an unprecedented political crisis, prompting a government collapse and new elections that left the FPÖ weakened and in opposition.
In retrospect, it was a lucky turn of events for the party. While Kurz’s ÖVP did well in the election as the FPÖ sank, the flurry of investigations surrounding Ibiza ended up ensnaring the center right as well.
A cache of revealing text messages discovered on a Kurz aide’s phone exposed the chancellor’s sonny-boy persona to be fiction; instead of the modernizer the chancellor claimed to be, Kurz was revealed as an old-school machine politician willing to do whatever it took to ensure his hold on power.
Facing criminal investigations for allegedly making false statements to parliament and using state funds to pay for manipulated polls, Kurz was forced to resign in October 2021 and is currently standing trial.
Austria’s former chancellor Sebastian Kurz was embroiled in a flurry of investigations surrounding the Ibiza scandal | Alex Halada/AFP via Getty Images
Kickl, meanwhile, took over the FPÖ and has used its time in opposition to reposition the party both as a scourge of the corruption it once embodied and as a paragon of far-right ideology: anti-immigrant, anti-establishment, anti-EU and anti-support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The turnaround of his party indicates that voters may be willing to look past previous corruption if a party has a compelling message and a leader who embodies it. Though Kickl’s approval ratings aren’t high, people take him seriously. In contrast to Strache, a trained dental technician who cultivated a playboy image, Kickl is an austere presence with a passion for triathlons and other extreme sports who eats unsweetened oatmeal with sour milk for breakfast.
After studying philosophy and political science (and completing degrees in neither), Kickl became active in the Freedom Party in the 1990s as an aide to Jörg Haider, the party’s then-leader who pioneered many of the far-right strategies, including the focus on migration, that have made the parties a force to be reckoned with across Europe. A charismatic icon to many in Austria, Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, led the Freedom Party into government in 2000 as the junior partner to the ÖVP, sparking outrage across Europe and a diplomatic boycott by Austria’s EU partners.
For most of his political career, Kickl worked behind the scenes as an adviser and speechwriter. He is credited with coining many of the party’s most memorable — and controversial — slogans, such as “Pummerin, not muezin.” Pummerin is the nickname of the massive bell atop St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. It was originally cast from Turkish cannons captured during an Ottoman siege of the city in the 17th century. Some of Kickl’s other lines have been not just offensive, but outright racist. In a 2001 speech he wrote for Haider, he penned the line: “I don’t know how someone named Ariel can be so dirty,” an antisemitic reference to Ariel Muzikant, the then leader of Austria’s Jewish community. “Ariel” is also a brand of detergent.
Despite widespread condemnation of Kickl’s rhetoric (during a short stint as interior minister in 2018, he called for “concentrating asylum seekers in one place” and changed the name of an asylum registration facility to “deportation center“) his standing within the party only improved. In an effort to appeal to a wider audience, he has also softened some of his racist overtones — a bit. He recently began campaigning under the banner “Volkskanzler,” or people’s chancellor. While it may sound innocuous, it was also a moniker used by Hitler.
“He’s on the road to success,” said Anton Pelinka, the doyen of Austrian political science. “The content of what he says is as extreme as ever but the way in which he presents it is more moderate.”
That gentler approach has helped the FPÖ nearly double its support since the last election in 2019. The party has also scored strong gains in a string of regional elections, joining state government alongside the ÖVP as the junior partner, a process that has helped further normalize its extreme political agenda.
In contrast, the ÖVP is on the defensive. The party’s support has fallen to about 20 percent, from a post-Ibiza high of more than 37 percent and its loss of regional support has forced it into coalition with the FPÖ.
Pilnacek affair
THE DRAMA SURROUNDING KURZ HASN’T HELPED. Now a business consultant, the ex-chancellor recently suffered another blow after his association with René Benko, a high-flying Austrian real estate tycoon, was exposed.
Benko, whose empire was forced into bankruptcy in recent weeks in the largest insolvency in Austrian history, employed Kurz to lure investors from the Middle East, agreeing to pay the former politician millions in return.
And there’s Kurz’s role in the Pilnacek affair. On the morning the body of the former official was discovered, Kurz interrupted his testimony in court to express his shock, saying he had spoken to him the night before about his case. “I saw how he was treated in recent years, and I saw what it did to him,” he told journalists later that day.
Kurz wasn’t referring to his own party’s treatment of Pilnacek, however, but the corruption prosecutor’s pursuit of him. Unwittingly, the chancellor triggered the release of the damning audio of Pilnacek in the restaurant.
The recording was made by Christian Mattura, a former politician, who was having dinner with Pilnacek and decided to secretly tape the conversation when the subject turned to the ÖVP. He claimed later he had no intention of releasing the audio until he heard Kurz’s comments, which he viewed as hypocrisy and as a crass attempt to use Pilnacek’s tragic end to attack prosecutors.
Kurz declined to comment for this article.
Austrian National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka | Alex Halada/APA/AFP via Getty Images
More damaging to the ÖVP, however, is the role of its parliamentary president, Wolfgang Sobotka. In the recording, Pilnacek fingered Sobotka, a former interior minister and longtime ÖVP powerbroker, for pressuring him to end a number of investigations into the party.
“In every conversation, Sobotka would say, ‘you failed, you didn’t shut down’” the investigations, Pilnacek said on the secret recording. “But it wasn’t possible, and I wouldn’t do it. We live in a country of laws.”
Sobotka denied the allegations, saying that he never discussed ongoing investigations with Pilnacek, a fact he said the official had himself confirmed in testimony to parliament. Sobotka said he would continue to carry out his office “in accordance with the law.”
Kickl has wasted few opportunities to capitalize on the scandal, calling for Sobotka’s immediate resignation, telling him directly in parliament: “You are not our president.”
“I’m tempted to say that in comparison to you, Strache was a man of honor,” Kickl said during a debate, referring to his predecessor’s quick resignation after the Ibiza video became public. “At least he knew what to do when he was confronted with the accusations.”
Sobotka appears intent on waiting for things to blow over, a tactic that has worked before. In 2020, it emerged that Novomatic, an Austrian casino group at the center of the Ibiza investigations, had donated €8,000 to a chamber orchestra in Sobotka’s hometown, Waidhofen an der Ybbs. The orchestra’s director? Wolfgang Sobotka. He disputes any connection to the donation.
The politician’s affinity for classical music also inspired him to rent a gold-plated Bösendorfer grand piano for the parliament to the tune of €3,000 a month. His office defended the move, arguing that “art and culture are a top priority in Austria.” The public wasn’t buying it though, and Sobotka eventually bowed to pressure to exchange the piano for a standard black model.
Fixing the reputational damage has been more challenging. About 80 percent of voters have no confidence in him, according to a recent poll, ranking Sobotka last among all Austrian politicians. Sobotka did not respond to comment for this article.
So far, Sobotka has refused to resign, handing a gift that keeps on giving to Kickl, for whom Sobotka serves as Exhibit A in his recitation of all that’s wrong with the other political parties. Kickl understands that — given his lead in the polls — he only needs to wait. “The madness will end soon,” he promised his party faithful in Graz. “Salvation is at hand.”
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has propelled rising star Gabriel Attal center stage in a high-risk gamble aimed at stopping the far right’s surge ahead of the European election.
In a surprise move on Tuesday, Macron appointed his former education minister and one of France’s most popular politicians as the country’s youngest-ever prime minister in a bid to re-energize his flagging presidency — at the risk of hastening the end of his own reign.
Macron has been under pressure to jump-start his presidency as the far-right National Rally outstrips the centrists in polls ahead of the EU election in June, and in the wake of two brutal fights last year over immigration and pensions.
In contrast to the no-holds-barred election campaign led by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s lead candidate, Macron’s presidency has struggled to project any energy and vitality after seven years running France, and talk of a lame-duck presidency has become widespread in political circles.
Despite his short political career, the 34-year-old Attal has earned himself a reputation as an obstinate attack dog or a “word sniper” against the far right, having already crossed swords with Bardella in past election debates, and a deft operator fluent as government spokesperson during the Covid pandemic and as education minister.
“It’s a great media coup,” said a conservative Les Républicains heavyweight, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. Macron “is doing it because [Attal] will lead the European election campaign … he was the only one who could hold his own against Bardella,” he said.
Several political insiders told POLITICO the battle of the European election was one of the main reasons Macron chose Attal.
“Gabriel Attal and Jordan Bardella are of the same generation, it’s obvious. Attal has political acumen, knows how to deliver a punchline, with substance, so it’s someone who can face off with the National Rally,” said an aide to Macron. But it’ll be thanks to “his action” that he’ll be able to beat the National Rally, he added.
The nomination of a pugnacious politician with his own ambitions also carries a sizeable risk for the president, who has in the past favored more self-effacing, technocratic figures as his lieutenants. An Attal premiership may accelerate conversations on what comes after Macron as the French president cannot run for a third term.
The meteoric rise of Attal, not unlike Macron himself, is also ruffling feathers among Macron’s heavyweight allies who look askance at the young uber-achiever taking over the reins of government. Macron was “forced to work hard” to get the nomination accepted when it was supposed to be “a slam dunk,” said an ally of the president on Monday.
Macron’s Mini-Me on the campaign
The upcoming European election will be the last time Macron faces off with his nemesis Marine Le Pen before the end of his mandate in four years. A far-right victory would resonate for years and poison the president’s legacy.
The president’s troops have emerged battered after his much-hardened immigration bill was passed with the support of the far-right, an episode that almost splintered his centrist alliance. The immigration battle came on the heels of acrimonious debates last spring over the reform of French pensions which sparked weeks of nationwide protests.
Macron is languishing in poll ratings according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls with only 30 percent approval ratings.
His outgoing Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne was criticized as a technocrat who lacked charisma and political agility, worn out by successive struggles to pass legislation following Macron’s defeat in parliamentary elections last year. She also lost a lot of political capital when she failed to anticipate or prevent a shock defeat in parliament, when the National Assembly rejected the immigration bill without a vote in December.
Attal, on the other hand, is a fresh hand at the helm.
“It’s great news, we’re going to have a government head who is a political operator, and capable of embodying Macron’s pro-European vision,” said Alexandre Holroyd, an MP from Macron’s Renaissance Party.
“To stop the far-right, which is rising not just in France but across Europe, we have to show that political action is efficient,” and talking to the general public is one thing Attal is good at, he added.
Strategically, Attal’s nomination may also help secure the support of center-left voters, as leftwing MEP Raphaël Glucksmann emerges as a competing candidate ahead of the European election. Attal, a former Socialist Party member and the first openly gay prime minister, espouses progressive ideas and has made cyber-bullying and homophobia prominent causes.
What’s really changed?
Macron himself has tasked Attal with the “regeneration” of his government, with “audacity” and “in the spirit of 2017,” his first election year, he wrote on X.
But while Attal is a fresh face, Macron’s margin of maneuver on the domestic front is shrinking, and it’s unlikely the new premiership will be plain sailing. The centrists still lack a majority in parliament, so passing legislation will remain a painful, humiliating process as the government seeks ad hoc alliances with opposition MPs.
Macron is also struggling to find inspiration for his second mandate, and has piled up vague initiatives, such as the “100 days” last year, the “Saint Denis meetings” with opposition leaders, and this month “the meeting with the nation.”
But the nomination does partially resolve an issue that has dogged Macron’s camp for weeks: who will run as Macron’s lead candidate in the European election? The far right has been hitting the campaign trail for weeks and Macron, a notorious procrastinator, has still not chosen a lead candidate for France’s Renew campaign.
With many heavyweights in government reluctant to lead a difficult campaign, the names floated in Paris — Europe Minister Laurence Boone or Renew Group leader Stéphane Séjourné — appeared to lack sufficient clout to stand up to the far-right.
Gabriel Attal carries more than just the European campaign on his shoulders | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin via AFP/Getty Images
With this week’s reshuffle, Renew’s lead candidate in France could play more of a supporting role.
But Attal carries more than just the European campaign on his shoulders. As one of the stars of “Génération Macron,” young politicians who straddle the left-right divide and came to power with the French president, Attal will save or hasten the end of Macronism and its centrist, pro-European political offer.
It’s the “last bullet before the end of his mandate,” said the same conservative heavyweight cited above.
WARSAW — The campaign language ahead of this year’s Polish general election is apocalyptic — painting it as an existential battle for the soul of the EU’s fifth most populous country — but the likeliest outcome is a chaotic stalemate.
If the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) hangs on to power for a third term there isn’t much more it can do to wreck Poland without quitting the EU — and there’s little prospect of that. If the opposition pulls off a stunner and wins it will be so hemmed in by PiS-controlled courts and institutions and by a hostile president that it won’t be able to do much more than tweak the optics rather than surgically remove the growths added by Law and Justice.
Internationally, Poland is too important to be kept in the deep freeze forever; with a fast-growing economy, a big military and a key role in supplying Ukraine, it is no Slovakia. A PiS win will mean greater efforts to find some accommodation with Warsaw; an opposition victory will dramatically improve the atmosphere, but there are limits to even an opposition-ruled Poland’s coziness on many issues that are key to the EU.
An opposition victory could weaken PiS’s institutional advantages that it’s been using to skew the playing field in its favor — potentially leading to a longer-term shift away from the right-wing party that’s dominated Polish politics for the past eight years. But it’s no quick fix.
According to PiS, opposition leader Donald Tusk is a disloyal Pole who is working on behalf of both Germany and Russia to turn the country into a puppet state by letting in hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Oh, and he also wants to raise the retirement age.
Jarosław Kaczyński, the PiS chief and Poland’s real ruler, thundered to his supporters on Sunday: “Donald Tusk had to agree to make Poland subservient to Germany and therefore to Russia.”
“Stop Tusk. Only PiS can ensure Poland’s security,” trumpets an election ad.
For the opposition, led by Tusk’s Civic Coalition, another four-year term with Law and Justice at the helm means real danger for the future of Poland as a democratic country, as well as undermining the rights of women thanks to a draconian abortion law and an LGBTQ+ minority subjected to attacks by ruling party officials.
“Law and Justice is poison,” Tusk said at a campaign rally this summer. “Every day, every month they are in power is a growing threat to our security.”
Those fighting words are designed to budge the electorate; POLITICO’s Poll of Polls shows PiS at 37 percent while Civic Coalition is at 30 percent — meaning any new government is going to require cobbling together a coalition with smaller parties.
Polish Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party Jarosław Kaczyński has promised that if his party wins, he’ll continue the judicial system changes that have so distressed the EU | Marian Zubrzycki/EPA-EFE
It’s not all rhetorical spin.
“There is always a tendency to say this is the most important election since 1989 [the election that ended communist rule], but this time there is a somewhat stronger case for making that argument. The level of polarization is evidence for that,” said Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
High stakes
The outcome is going to be watched very closely, from Brussels to Kyiv.
For the European Union, the hope is that if PiS is ousted Poland will return to the ways of Tusk, who served as Polish prime minister during a remarkable era of comity with the EU and with Germany before going on to become president of the European Council. As an added sweetener, Brussels will likely quickly move to release €36 billion in loans and grants from the bloc’s pandemic recovery fund held up over worries that PiS’s court system reforms undermine judicial independence.
The EU court cases, parliamentary resolutions, infringement procedures and Article 7 effort to strip Poland of its voting rights would also likely be shelved.
The German government would also sigh with relief at seeing the back of a government that has fiercely needled Berlin at every occasion and also called for up to $1.3 trillion in compensation for the destruction caused by the Nazi occupation; although the opposition hasn’t cut itself off from that demand.
Poland has been one of Ukraine’s fiercest advocates during the war — sending tanks and jet fighters ahead of most other countries, offering diplomatic support, receiving millions of refugees who fled the early days of the war, and serving as the main transshipment point for weapons and other aid heading east.
But the election campaign has soured that relationship.
Warsaw led the charge in blocking Ukrainian grain exports, worried it would undercut Polish prices and harm farmers — a key voting bloc. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dared to criticize Poland at the U.N., a furious President Andrzej Duda compared Ukraine to a drowning man who poses a danger to his rescuers.
“We say to the Ukrainian authorities — do not do what goes against the interests of Polish farmers,” lectured Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who said last month that Poland would stop sending weapons to Ukraine while it rebuilt its own stocks.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau skipped this week’s summit in Kyiv. Getting relations back on an even keel will take “a titanic effort,” he said.
Tusk promised a reset: “We cannot allow good Polish-Ukrainian relations to depend on the negligence and chaos created by the Polish government.”
Polish opposition leader and former premier, Donald Tusk addresses participants of a rally in Warsaw on October 1, 2023 | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images
A PiS victory will send shock waves across Europe.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, Kaczyński’s closest ally, has been building his illiberal democracy for over a decade. With Rome governed by right-winger Giorgia Meloni, Slovakian populist Robert Fico scoring a victory in last week’s election, and the far-right Alternative for Germany party rising fast in the polls, the signal is that the right is gaining strength across the Continent.
That’s likely to further erode the tenuous hold on power of centrist parties in the European Parliament in next year’s election.
It will also block any chance of agreeing on a migration pact to tackle the thousands of people crossing EU borders and kill any effort to reform EU institutions ahead of an expansion to Balkan countries and Ukraine.
“A PiS government will block reforms on issues like taxation and foreign policy that threaten the national veto right. There is also a different approach to migration,” warned a senior Polish government official who spoke on condition of being granted anonymity. “We have another model of the European Union.”
Reality bites
However, despite the rhetoric, the reality is that the election is unlikely to mean a radical worsening of relations between Warsaw and Brussels.
Kaczyński has promised that if his party wins he’ll continue the judicial system changes that have so distressed the EU, after admitting that the reforms made so far haven’t worked. He vowed: “This time it will succeed.”
But his party has already sent out peace feelers to Brussels, trying and so far failing to backtrack on some changes to top courts to get the Commission to release the blocked funds.
If Law and Justice wins a third term, EU institutions will have to decide whether they want to continue the confrontation, or else make peace with a Poland that has firmly chosen a populist course.
“It takes two to tango. Maybe there will be a will to compromise on both sides,” said the Polish government official.
Permanent ostracism is also untenable, as Hungary showed this week by playing a skillful game of getting the EU to release blocked funds to avoid Orbán vetoing aid for Ukraine.
Despite opposition charges that PiS wants to pull Poland out of the EU in a Polexit — a cry from parts of the far right — Law and Justice says it has no intention of following the U.K. out of the bloc.
The results of the Polish general election could influence the upcoming European Parliament election and Poland’s presidential election in 2025 | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images
“PiS’s direction has always been toward the EU,” said PiS MP Radosław Fogiel.
And an opposition-led Poland would also be no easy partner for Brussels. After the initial flush of warmth, perennial problems will return like Poland’s continued addiction to coal-fired power, its reluctance to join the euro, and a suspicion of large flows of migrants — also voiced by Tusk during the campaign.
“Even if there is a change of government, there will still be very strong public opposition to a change in migration policy,” said Jacek Czaputowicz, a former foreign minister under the PiS government, speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum.
Poland’s large and powerful farming sector will be a huge issue for Ukrainian grain exports and for future efforts to recalibrate the EU to accommodate new and poorer members.
Ukrainian politicians hope that the war of words with Warsaw will die down after the election.
“War is exhausting for Ukraine and for Poland too, so emotions are felt on both sides, in addition, the election campaign in Poland, that tends to politicize everything, even economic issues,” said Andriy Deshchytsia, former Ukrainian ambassador to Poland, adding: “However, the Russian threat is still here, just like a year ago … so we don’t have any other choice but to sit and search for a compromise.”
As bad as it gets
At home, the election is also unlikely to have the earth-shattering impact that’s being voiced during the campaign.
PiS has done a lot of damage over the last eight years, and it’s difficult to see how much more it can do while still remaining a member of the EU. The state media is a Euro-lite version of North Korea, state-controlled corporations are stuffed with party hacks, the highest courts are firmly under political control, much of the Roman Catholic Church functions as a PiS acolyte, the police don’t mind clubbing the occasional opposition protester, the prosecutor’s office has become a political plaything — dropping investigations of the well-connected while fiercely pursuing the regime’s opponents.
But expanding that control will be difficult in an economy that has a large and vibrant private sector, a strong civil society and hefty private media.
Non-government media operators are owned by foreign companies that have shown no sign of backing out of the Polish market; an earlier effort to tangle with American-owned TVN, the country’s largest private television network, was quickly slapped down by Washington.
The EU is also working on a rulebook that aims to secure media independence against political pressure and foster pluralism; Commission Vice President Věra Jourová warned it “will be a major warning signal for member states.”
An opposition win would dramatically change the optics with Brussels, and a new government would scrap further legal changes to courts. But any effort to roll back those reforms, and any other PiS legislation, will run into a significant hurdle: President Duda.
There is a chance that Poland’s President Andrzej Duda will cooperate, as Tusk has threatened to prosecute him for violating the constitution | Leon Neal/Getty Images
There is no poll predicting an opposition win so gigantic that it would gain a two-thirds majority of MPs needed to overturn presidential vetoes. The country’s top courts are filled with judges appointed by the current government, meaning legislation will also be caught up in endless litigation.
“Even if they win an outright majority, which doesn’t look likely at the moment, this is an internally divided opposition and they face a president who will be able to veto their legislation,” said Szczerbiak.
However, there is a chance that Duda will cooperate, as Tusk has threatened to prosecute him for violating the constitution.
“Duda is a dealmaker,” said Wawrzyniec Smoczyński, a political analyst and president of the New Community Foundation. “Tusk is a big risk for him and the way to lessen that is to strike a deal.”
If Duda doesn’t play ball, a non-PiS government could be limited to purging state companies, the government and the media of PiS loyalists.
“Overnight you will get the public media back. Everyone will be booted out of there,” Tusk pledged.
Those small steps are unlikely to satisfy opposition backers yearning for revenge against Law and Justice and a clean break with the last eight years.
“For Poland, it’s all fucked up,” said Paweł Piechowiak, taking part in last week’s massive opposition march in Warsaw while waving huge Polish and EU flags, his cheeks painted in rainbow colors. “You can’t wreck this country any more than it is.”
But those personnel changes may have longer term consequences by switching public media away from backing PiS, which could undercut that party’s base of support in rural and small-town Poland.
That could change the political dynamic, especially if the next government is short-lived and there is an early election; it could also influence the upcoming European Parliament election and Poland’s presidential election in 2025.
“The parliamentary election could be viewed as the first round of a longer campaign,” said Szczerbiak.
Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting from Kyiv.
The European Union has survived — and thrived — in the past five years and is ready for the next challenge: artificial intelligence.
That’s one of the prominent messages Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered in her annual State of the Union address — the last such speech ahead of the looming European election in 2024, and thus possibly in her career as leader of the EU executive.
Since her 2019 speech as president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen has stewarded the EU through a pandemic, economic crisis and a war on European soil.
With EU elections now only eight months away, this year’s speech focused on the Commission’s work over the course of its mandate, with von der Leyen claiming a 90 percent success rate in delivering on political guidelines she presented in 2019 (although this figure has been contested.)
Looking to the future, the speech paid more attention than previous years to the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on the European Union, and plans for significant enlargement of the bloc.
We crunched the numbers on von der Leyen’s latest, and possibly last, script.
With research from POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division.
BRUSSELS — Right-wing and Euroskeptic parties are set to surge in the next European election at the expense of centrist parties, exclusive polling analysis by POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division shows.
If the elections were held today, the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) would become the third-biggest group in the European Parliament — tied with the centrist Renew — with 89 seats.
That would represent a massive 23-seat gain from the 2019 elections for the sometime-Euroskeptic ECR — home of Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice party — with most of the surge coming from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Similarly, the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group would make sizable gains, winning 77 seats — a 15-seat rise driven by the Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) recent surge in the polls.
The anticipated rightward swing reflects a broader trend across national elections in Europe, where voters in countries such as Italy, Finland and Greece have increasingly elevated more conservative and hard-right parties.
That said, POLITICO’s analysis shows that the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) would retain its spot as the Parliament’s largest group, despite a predicted 12-seat loss taking it down to 165 seats.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany | Rinny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images
The center-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) would even gain two seats to preserve its spot as Parliament’s No. 2 group, with 145 seats. Renew would drop 12 seats to match ECR in the third slot, the analysis shows.
That means the traditional grand coalition of the EPP, S&D and Renew, which spans the center left to center right, would keep its clear majority over a potential new right-leaning alliance of EPP, ECR and Renew.
Recently, however, the EPP has shown a willingness to partner with ECR, allying with the group to oppose Green Deal legislation.
The election’s biggest losers would be the Greens, which would keep only 48 seats, a loss of 24 spots, while the Left group would gain eight seats but remain the smallest group in Parliament with 45 seats.
Europeans will head to the polls from June 6-9 next year to select the 705 MEPs who represent them in Brussels. The number of MEPs is set to increase to 720 for the 2024 elections but, as the changes still need to be formally approved by the European Council and Parliament itself, the polling estimates are based on a 705-seat scenario.
These seat projections are based on national voting intention polls aggregated in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, taking into account each country’s current system to allocate Parliament seats.
POLITICO’s Research and Analysis Division also consulted with experts to assign new unaffiliated European lawmakers to their likely groupings.
STRASBOURG — The European Parliament’s response to Qatargate: Fight corruption with paperwork.
When Belgian police made sweeping arrests and recovered €1.5 million from Parliament members in a cash-for-influence probe last December, it sparked mass clamoring for a deep clean of the institution, which has long languished with lax ethics and transparency rules, and even weaker enforcement.
Seven months later, the Parliament and its president, Roberta Metsola, can certainly claim to have tightened some rules — but the results are not much to shout about. With accused MEPs Eva Kaili and Marc Tarabella back in the Parliament and even voting on ethics changes themselves, the reforms lack the political punch to take the sting out of a scandal that Euroskeptic forces have leaped on ahead of the EU election next year.
“Judge us on what we’ve done rather [than] on what we didn’t,” Metsola told journalists earlier this month, arguing that Parliament has acted swiftly where it could.
While the Parliament can claim some limited improvements, calls for a more profound overhaul in the EU’s only directly elected institution — including more serious enforcement of existing rules — have been met with finger-pointing, blame-shifting and bureaucratic slow-walking.
The Parliament dodged some headline-worthy proposals in the process. It declined to launch its own inquiry into what really happened, it decided not to force MEPs to declare their assets and it won’t be stripping any convicted MEPs of their gold-plated pensions.
Instead, the institution favored more minimal nips and tucks. The rule changes amount to much more bureaucracy and more potential alarm bells to spot malfeasance sooner — but little in the way of stronger enforcement of ethics rules for MEPs.
EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly, who investigates complaints about EU administration lamented that the initial sense of urgency to adopt strict reforms had “dissipated.” After handing the EU a reputational blow, she argued, the scandal’s aftermath offered a pre-election chance, “to show that lessons have been learned and safeguards have been put in place.”
Former MEP Richard Corbett, who co-wrote the Socialists & Democrats group’s own inquiry into Qatargate and favors more aggressive reforms, admitted he isn’t sure whether Parliament will get there.
“The Parliament is getting to grips with this gradually, muddling its way through the complex field, but it’s too early to say whether it will do what it should,” he said.
Bags of cash
The sense of resignation that criminals will be criminals was only one of the starting points that shaped the Parliament’s response.
“We will never be able to prevent people taking bags of cash. This is human nature. What we have to do is create a protection network,” said Raphaël Glucksmann, a French MEP who sketched out some longer-term recommendations he hopes the Parliament will take up.
Another is that the Belgian authorities’ painstaking judicial investigation is still ongoing, with three MEPs charged and a fourth facing imminent questioning. Much is unknown about how the alleged bribery ring really operated, or what the countries Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania really got for their bribes.
On top of that, Parliament was occasionally looking outward rather than inward for people to blame.
Metsola’s message in the wake of the scandal was that EU democracy was “under attack” by foreign forces. The emphasis on “malign actors, linked to autocratic third countries” set the stage for the Parliament’s response to Qatargate: blame foreign interference, not an integrity deficit.
Instead of creating a new panel to investigate how corruption might have steered Parliament’s work, Parliament repurposed an existing committee on foreign interference and misinformation to probe the matter. The result was a set of medium- and long-term recommendations that focus as much on blocking IT contractors from Russia and China as they do on holding MEPs accountable — and they remain merely recommendations.
Metsola did also turn inward, presenting a 14-point plan in January she labeled as “first steps” of a promised ethics overhaul. The measures are a finely tailored lattice-work of technical measures that could make it harder for Qatargate to happen again, primarily by making it harder to lobby the Parliament undetected.
The central figure in Qatargate, an Italian ex-MEP called Pier Antonio Panzeri, enjoyed unfettered access to the Parliament, using it to give prominence to his human rights NGO Fight Impunity, which held events and even struck a collaboration deal with the institution.
This 14-point package, which Metsola declared is now “done,” includes a new entry register, a six-month cooling-off period banning ex-MEPs from lobbying their colleagues, tighter rules for events, stricter scrutiny of human rights work — all tailored to ensure a future Panzeri hits a tripwire and can be spotted sooner.
Notably, however, an initial idea to ban former MEPs from lobbying for two years after leaving office — which would mirror the European Commission’s rules — instead turned into just a six-month “cooling off” period.
Internal divisions
Behind the scenes, the house remains sharply divided over just how much change is needed. Many MEPs resisted bigger changes to how they conduct their work, despite Metsola’s promise in December that there would be “no business as usual,” which she repeated in July.
The limited ambition reflects an argument — pushed by a powerful subset of MEPs, primarily in Metsola’s large, center-right European People’s Party group — that changing that “business as usual” will only tie the hands of innocent politicians while doing little to stop the few with criminal intent. They’re bolstered by the fact that the Socialists & Democrats remain the only group touched by the scandal.
“There were voices in this house who said, ‘Do nothing, these things will always happen, things are fine as they are,’” Metsola said. Some of the changes, she said, had been “resisted for decades” before Qatargate momentum pushed them through.
The Parliament already has some of the Continent’s highest standards for legislative bodies, said Rainer Wieland, a long-serving EPP member from Germany who sits on the several key rule-making committees: “I don’t think anyone can hold a candle to us.”
MEP Rainer Wieland holds lots of sway over the reforms | Patrick Seeger/EFE via EPA
Those who are still complaining, he added in a debate last week, “are living in wonderland.”
Wieland holds lots of sway over the reforms. He chairs an internal working group on the Parliament’s rules that feeds into the Parliament’s powerful Committee on Constitutional Affairs, where Metsola’s 14-point plan will be translated into cold, hard rules.
Those rule changes are expected to be adopted by the full Parliament in September.
The measures will boost existing transparency rules significantly. The lead MEP on a legislative file will soon have to declare (and deal with) potential conflicts of interest, including those coming from their “emotional life.” And more MEPs will have to publish their meetings related to parliamentary business, including those with representatives from outside the EU.
Members will also have to disclose outside income over €5,000 — with additional details about the sector if they work in something like law or consulting.
Negotiators also agreed to double potential penalties for breaches: MEPs can lose their daily allowance and be barred from most parliamentary work for up to 60 days.
Yet the Parliament’s track record punishing MEPs who break the rules is virtually nonexistent.
As it stands, an internal advisory committee can recommend a punishment, but it’s up to the president to impose it. Of 26 breaches of transparency rules identified over the years, not one MEP has been punished. (Metsola has imposed penalties for things like harassment and hate speech.)
And hopes for an outside integrity cop to help with enforcement were dashed when a long-delayed Commission proposal for an EU-wide independent ethics body was scaled back.
Stymied by legal constraints and left-right divides within the Parliament, the Commission opted for suggesting a standards-setting panel that, at best, would pressure institutions into better policing their own rules.
“I really hate listening to some, especially members of the European Parliament, who say that ‘Without having the ethics body, we cannot behave ethical[ly],’” Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová lamented in June.
Metsola, for her part, has pledged to adhere to the advisory committee’s recommendations going forward. But MEPs from across the political spectrum flagged the president’s complete discretion to mete out punishments as unsustainable.
“The problem was not (and never really was) [so] much the details of the rules!!! But the enforcement,” French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield — who sits in the working group — wrote to POLITICO.
Wieland, the German EPP member on the rule-making committees, presented the situation more matter-of-factly: Parliament had done what it said it would do.
“We fully delivered” on Metsola’s plan, Wieland told POLITICO in an interview. “Not more than that.”
BRUSSELS — The European Parliament’s Socialists are warily eyeing their colleagues and assistants, wondering which putative ally might turn out to be a liar as new details emerge in a growing cash-for-favors scandal.
Long-simmering geographic divisions within the group, Parliament’s second largest, are fueling mistrust and discord. Members are at odds over how forcefully to defend their implicated colleagues. Others are nursing grievances over how the group’s leadership handled months of concerns about their lawmaker, Eva Kaili, who’s now detained pending trial.
Publicly, the group has shown remarkable solidarity during the so-called Qatargate scandal, which involves allegations that foreign countries bribed EU lawmakers. Socialists and Democrats (S&D) chief Iratxe García has mustered a unified response, producing an ambitious ethics reform proposal and launching an internal investigation without drawing an open challenge to her leadership. Yet as the Parliament’s center left ponders how to win back the public’s trust ahead of next year’s EU election, the trust among the members themselves is fraying.
“I feel betrayed by these people that are colleagues of our political group,” said Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch S&D MEP. “As far as I am concerned, we are all political victims, and I hope we can get the truth out in the open.”
S&D MEPs are grappling not only with a sense of personal betrayal but also a fear that the links to corruption could squash otherwise promising electoral prospects.
Social democrats were looking forward to running in 2024 on the bread-and-butter issues at the top of minds around the bloc amid persistent inflation, buoyed by Olaf Scholz’s rise in Germany and the Continent-wide popularity of Finland’s Sanna Marin. Now, the group’s appeal to voters’ pocketbooks could be overshadowed by suitcases filled with cash.
“We were completely unaware of what was going on,” said García, vowing that the group’s internal inquiry will figure out what went wrong. “We have to let the people responsible [for the investigation] work.”
The ‘darkest plenary’
Shock, anger and betrayal reverberated through the 145-strong caucus in early December last year when Belgian police began arresting senior S&D figures, chief among them a former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Eva Kaili, a rising star from Greece who had barely completed a year as one of Parliament’s 14 vice presidents.
“The Qatargate revelations came as a terrible shock to S&D staff and MEPs,” an S&D spokesperson said. “Many felt betrayed, their trust abused and broken. Anyone who has ever become a victim of criminals will understand it takes time to heal from such an experience.”
When the S&D gathered for a Parliament session in Strasbourg days after the first arrests, few members took it harder than the group’s president, García, who at one point broke down in tears, according to three people present.
“We are all not just political machines, but also human beings,” said German MEP Gabriele Bischoff, an S&D vice chair in her first term. “To adapt to such a crisis, and to deal with it, it’s not easy.”
“I mean, also, you trusted some of these people,” she said.
An Italian court ruled that the daughter of former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri can be extradited to Belgium | European Union
In Strasbourg the group showed zero appetite to watch the judicial process play out, backing a move to remove Kaili from her vice presidency role. (She has, through a lawyer, consistently maintained her innocence.)
The group’s leadership also pressured MEPs who in any way were connected to the issues or people in the scandal to step back from legislative work, even if they faced no charges.
“It was of course the darkest plenary we’ve had,” said Andreas Schieder, an Austrian S&D MEP who holds a top role on the committee charged with battling foreign interference post Qatargate. “But we took the right decisions quickly.”
The S&D hierarchy swiftly suspended Kaili from the group in December and meted out the same treatment to two other MEPs who would later be drawn into the probe.
But now many S&D MEPs are asking themselves how it was possible that a cluster of people exerted such influence across the Socialist group, how Kaili rose so quickly to the vice presidency and how so much allegedly corrupt behavior went apparently unnoticed for years.
Like family
The deep interpersonal connections between those accused and the rest of the group were part of what made it all so searing for the S&D tribe.
Belgian authorities’ initial sweep nabbed not only Panzeri and Kaili but also Kaili’s partner, a longtime parliamentary assistant named Francesco Giorgi, who had spent years working for Panzeri. Suddenly every former Panzeri assistant still in Parliament was under suspicion. Panzeri later struck a plea deal, offering to dish on whom he claims to have bribed in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Maria Arena, who succeeded Panzeri as head of the Parliament’s human rights panel in 2019, also found herself under heavy scrutiny: Her friendship with her predecessor was so close that she’d been spotted as his plus-one at his assistant’s wedding. Alessandra Moretti, another S&D MEP, has also been linked to the probe, according to legal documents seen by POLITICO.
The appearance of Laura Ballarin, García’s Cabinet chief, raising a glass with Giorgi and vacationing on a Mediterranean sailboat with Kaili, offered a tabloid-friendly illustration of just how enmeshed the accused were with the group’s top brass.
“I was the first one to feel shocked, hurt and deeply betrayed when the news came out,” Ballarin told POLITICO. “Yet, evidently, my personal relations did never interfere with my professional role.”
Making matters worse, some three months later, the scandal has largely remained limited to the S&D. Two more of its members have been swallowed up since the initial round of arrests: Italy’s Andrea Cozzolino and Belgium’s Marc Tarabella — a well-liked figure known for handing out Christmas gifts to Parliament staff as part of a St. Nicholas act. Both were excluded, like Kaili, from the S&D group. They maintain their innocence.
Whiter than white
That’s putting pressure on García, who is seen in Brussels as an extension of the power of her close ally, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is one of S&D chief Iratxe García most important allies | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
However, she has not always been able to leverage that alliance in Brussels. A prime example is the backroom deal the political groups made to appoint the Parliament’s new secretary-general, Alessandro Chiocchetti, who hails from the center-right European People’s Party. García emerged mostly empty-handed from the negotiations, with the EPP maneuvering around her and The Left group securing an entirely new directorate general.
Kaili, from a tiny two-person Greek Socialist delegation, would also have never gotten the nod to become vice president in 2022 without García and the Spanish Socialists’ backing.
Yet when it comes to trying to clean house and reclaim the moral high ground, the Socialist chief has brought people together. “She deserves to be trusted to do this correctly,” said René Repasi, a German S&D lawmaker.
In the new year, the S&D successfully pushed through the affable, progressive Luxembourgish Marc Angel to replace Kaili, fending off efforts by other left-leaning and far-right groups to take one of the S&D’s seats in the Parliament’s rule-making bureau. In another move designed to steady the ship, the Socialists in February drafted Udo Bullmann, an experienced German MEP who previously led the S&D group, as a safe pair of hands to replace Arena on the human rights subcommittee.
And in a bid to go on the offensive, the Socialists published a 15-point ethics plan (one-upping the center-right Parliament president’s secret 14-point plan). It requires all S&D MEPs — and their assistants — to disclose their meetings online and pushes for whistleblower protections in the Parliament. Where legally possible, the group pledges to hold its own members to these standards — for example by banning MEPs from paid-for foreign trips — even if the rest of the body doesn’t go as far.
Those results were hard won, group officials recounted. With members from 26 EU countries, the group had to navigate cultural and geographic divisions on how to handle corruption, exposing north-south fault lines.
“To do an internal inquiry was not supported in the beginning by all, but we debated it,” said Bischoff, describing daily meetings that stretched all the way to Christmas Eve.
The idea of recruiting outside players to conduct an internal investigation was also controversial, she added. Yet in the end, the group announced in mid-January that former MEP Richard Corbett and Silvina Bacigalupo, a law professor and board member of Transparency International Spain, would lead a group-backed inquiry, which has now begun.
The moves appear to have staved off a challenge to García’s leadership, and so far, attacks from the Socialists’ main rival, the EPP, have been limited. But S&D MEPs say there’s still an air of unease, with some concerned the cleanup hasn’t gone deep enough — while others itch to defend the accused.
Some party activists quietly question if the response was too fast and furious.
Arena’s political future is in doubt, for example, even though she’s faced no criminal charges. Following mounting pressure about her ties to Panzeri, culminating with a POLITICO report on her undeclared travel to Qatar, Arena formally resigned from the human rights subcommittee. The group is not defending her, even as some activists mourn the downfall of someone they see as a sincere champion for human rights causes.
Vocal advocacy for Kaili has also fueled controversy: Italian S&D MEPs drew groans from colleagues when they hawked around a letter about the treatment of Kaili and her daughter, which only garnered 10 signatures.
“I do not believe it was necessary,” García said of the letter. “[If] I worry about the situation in jails, it has to be for everyone, not for a specific MEP.”
The letter also did nothing to warm relations between the S&D’s Spanish and Italian delegations, which have been frosty since before the scandal. The S&D spokesperson in a statement rejected the notion that there are tensions along geographical lines: “There’s no divide between North and South, nor East and West, and there’s no tension between the Italian and Spanish delegations.”
In another camp are MEPs who are looking somewhat suspiciously at their colleagues.
Repasi, the German S&D member, said he is weary of “colleagues that are seemingly lying into your face” — a specific reference to Tarabella, who vocally denied wrongdoing for weeks, only to have allegations surface that he took around €140,000 in bribes from Panzeri, the detained ex-lawmaker.
Repasi added: “It makes you more and more wonder if there is anyone else betting on the fact that he or she might not be caught.”
Jakob Hanke Vela, Karl Mathiesen and Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed reporting.
