Gavan Reilly: How this Thursday might be the most important day of 2024
It probably wasn’t circled in your diary as being a date of any major consequence. In my own, it’s basically ‘the day after my eldest’s birthday’. She’s 5 on Wednesday, which can’t possibly be right given it feels like she was born only about eight months ago, but how and ever…
No, Thursday is a big day on two fronts. Firstly, not terribly glamorous: it’s the meeting of the European Political Community (EPC), which is gathering at Blenheim Palace outside Oxford. That’s the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and might be the birth of Keir Starmer’s credentials as an international leader. The EPC is a creature born of Brexit: Emmanuel Macron realised there needed to be some forum where the UK and other non-EU members could sit at the table and speak as equals about their common concerns. By fluke of the calendar, Starmer now finds himself hosting such a gathering within two weeks of taking power.
But it’ll be an interesting day to be a fly on the wall of a European pow-wow, because there’s some interesting stuff happening in Strasbourg too. This week marks the first sitting of the new European Parliament, and Thursday is the date on which MEPs will vote on the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen for a second term.
On paper, she should be home and hosed. Five years ago she was an unknown quantity; now she’s an established Brussels heavyweight with a half decade of experience leading the bloc through a pandemic and a war on its borders. She’s also, in principle, backed by all the major pro-European groupings in the Parliament and should be able to muster the 361 votes she needs.
But the only thing on paper is the ballot: this is a secret ballot, and there are many problems with her candidacy. Her stance on Israel and Gaza is one – so much so that the four Fianna Fáil MEPs, contrary to party direction, will oppose her. Plenty of others in her own grouping, Fine Gael’s EPP, think her ‘green new deal’ plans ask too much of the ordinary worker and will smother small business.
If she gets over the line, then fine. It’s a secret ballot, so von der Leyen’s critics – the four Fianna Fáilers amongst them – are fully capable of saying one thing and doing another. But if she doesn’t, the entire arrangement that underpins how the EU should run for the next five years, goes belly-up. The careful choreography where Estonia’s liberal centrist prime minister will become the EU’s new foreign affairs head, and Portugal’s socialist ex-PM chairs meetings of the European Council, collapses. Brussels will enter stasis, and be left in the strategic hands of the EU’s current rotating presidency – Hungary, led by the illiberal Kremlin-sympathising strongman Viktor Orban.
All of that would kick off while the great and the good of European politics are all in Oxfordshire, trying to reaffirm the continent’s opposition to Russia and the need for countries to be able to peacefully, but firmly, control their own affairs.
Oh, to be a fly on that wall…