Will the newly elected European Parliament take a sharp right turn?
“It’s not likely,” explains Professor Luciano Bardi, part-time professor at the EUI’s Alcide De Gasperi Centre for Research on the History of European Integration (ADG). “The numbers, and the ideology, won’t permit it.”
Professor Bardi, along with ADG research fellow Dr Jacopo Cellini, explain the findings of their recent article 'Interparty Relations in the European Parliament 1952–2024: Between Cooperative and Adversarial Politics', published by the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.
The Martens Centre, the think tank for the European People’s Party (EPP), commissioned the two academics to carry out the research project. The work departs from their 2020 volume The European ambition: the group of the European People’s Party and European integration.
The new paper is grounded in both historical and political science methodologies, explains co-author Jacopo Cellini, a Fellow at the ADG. “We used internal and published documents from the political groups’ archives, interviews, and quantitative data from the European Parliament. We also built on analyses of intra-group cohesion and intergroup agreement such as those carried out by Simon Hix and his team, as well as research on party coalitions published by the Jacques Delors Institute. Christian Kloetzer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Milan, provided research assistance, helping on collecting and analysing sources and data.
“The analysis is based on very reliable data,” continued Professor Bardi. “We used official European Parliament data on party group size to calculate indexes of institutional relevance.”
“What we see is that the proximity of the European Conservatives to the EPP is significantly less than the Liberals,” explained Bardi. “The EPP would have to make a very sharp turn to the right, to the point of becoming anti-European, to engage in such an alliance. Such a turn would be the dissolution of their pro-European identity.”
Window onto the history of the European Parliament Groups
The Alcide De Gasperi Centre, a joint venture between the EUI’s History Department and the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU), is well-placed for research on party dynamics in the European Parliament. The HAEU is not only the official archives for the European Parliament, but it also preserves the archives of several political groups as well as numerous private archives of former Members of European Parliament and contains hundreds of oral history interviews with former European leaders and elected officials.
“We have reached out to all of the political groups,” said Professor Bardi. “We are pleased that the EPP has been a willing collaborator on pursuing research about the European Parliament. We would be eager to work in a similar way with the other European parties and foundations.”
Professor Bardi and Dr Cellini will present their paper at the multidisciplinary conference 'The European Parliament: Past, Present and Future,' to be held at the HAEU on 17-18 October 2024.